Days of Punk
| Punk Films
Michael Grecco started creating the new series Punk Art Films as an accompaniment to his traveling multi-media museum and gallery exhibition “Days of Punk.” Grecco conceived the films to offer visitors to the show more of a perspective on what “punk” means to the artists who created the movement. The first three films in what will be an ongoing project feature the Spanish punk band Orina. They premiered at the February 2022 opening of “Days of Punk” at La Térmica museum and cultural center in Malaga, Spain. As the exhibition travels to new destinations, artists from those local areas will be added to the film series. Grecco has also made videos from footage he shot in New York and Boston back in the heyday of punk.
On creating this body of work, Grecco says, “As a professional photographer, I have been fortunate to have worked long enough and hard enough to have built an archive of images that have historical value. During my days as a photojournalist working for the Associated Press and the Boston Herald, I was also a music photographer embedded in the Boston punk scene. As an artist, I did not realize then what photographing those fringe musicians would mean. Some of them have become icons at best, and infamous at worst, I happened to capture their formative years. I created this body of work late at night, on my days and hours off. It became my best-selling book Punk, Post Punk, New Wave: Onstage, Backstage, In Your Face, 1978 to 1991, and the images are also the centerpiece of an accompanying museum show, Days of Punk.
So, what do you do as an active artist and commercial advertising photographer who is showing historic work from his archive? YOU MAKE NEW WORK!
