Days of Punk | Fashion
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In the early 80s, Adam Ant was the epitome of Punk. By that time Punk was a music, culture, lifestyle and art, Adam Ant pushed it to pure theater. Punk was an organic DIY genre of music that emerged around the world as the antithesis of the taming of rock n’ roll. Once despised by mainstream society as the music of the devil, in the late 70s it became a cash machine for record companies, producers and millionaire acts.

Punk was the new revolution. As a music and a culture, Punk was the answer to choreographed large arena and stadium shows, merch sales and overproduced music. Born in basements, garages, bankrupt urban clubs and forgotten neighborhoods, Punk was disruptive, stripped-downmusic.

A Head on Collision with Theatrical Rock

In the early 1980s, Punk stars were rising. Among them was Adam Ant who was embracing the collision of Punk, Pop, and Pure Theater. Originally the front man of Adam and the Ants, and later a solo artist, Ant was a transformative force in a DIY fusion of Punk that embraced it all.

Adam Ant photographed by Michael Grecco

Born in London as Stuart Leslie Goddard, Adam Ant sprung to life in the DIY ethos of the1970s. He embraced loud confrontational grating rhythm, and insistence on artistic freedom then quickly transformed the visual essence of the genre. His Punk persona evolved rapidly with every live show. The theatrical vision of Ant married tribal rhythms with military imagery. The music told a story of a romantic outlaw, creating a mythology that he discarded and embraced at will.

The songs, “Stand and Deliver,” “Prince Charming” with Adam and The Ants and his solo hit, “Goofy Two Shoes” propelled him to the international spotlight from the punk clubs. His power was a new fusion of theatrical rock.

Photographic Persona

An innate actor, Ant treated the stage as a theatrical set. He cast himself as the star, who was accompanied by the music. Ant interacted with the camera as if it were his accomplice on and off the stage. His photographic persona projected naturally understood imagery that the photographer would capture and the photograph project.

Among the photographers of the era who witnessed Ant’s seduction of cameras was Michael Grecco. Grecco was an early documentary photographer of the emerging punk and post punk scenes of the scenes in Boston and New York in the 1970s and 80s.

Grecco images of Adam Ant, now considered iconic, include portraits taken in Boston and Cambridge in 1981. They capture a raw intimacy of club photography and the photographic theatrical persona of Adam Ant that teases the camera. Grecco had access to the performer’sbackstage, on the streets, in hallways and contemplative moments. His images of Ant speak volumes about his constructed characters, spontaneous energy and his intuitive photographic persona.

Adam Ant photographed by Michael Grecco

The Politics of Experience

Punk cannot be pigeonholed; the thousands of photographs snapped by Grecco since he walked into The Rat in 1978 to hear a band called La Peste attest to that. Grecco told the Guardian in an article discussing his years with the giants of Punk that the scene went beyond entertainment. “But it was also a war – a class war in Britain but a musical war in America.”

Grecco understands that Punk was a pivotal shift in the politics of experience from the theatrics of Adam Ant to those immersed in the culture.