“That’s Clem and Debbie right on 14th Street, probably in 1976 or ’77. Debbie’s blowing a plastic bird whistle. Everybody’s staring at them. They look striking; I don’t think anyone quite looked like that at the time.”
“I’m pretty sure this was taken in Philadelphia a little later in the early 1980s. Debbie always has this combination of being vulnerable and sort of aggressive at the same time and I think that’s in there.”
“This was in our apartment on 17th street off Sixth Avenue that burned down. We were on tour and my mother called me up and said, ‘Listen, don’t get upset, but your house burned down.’ We never lived there again. We went back and staged that. Allegedly that’s Marilyn Monroe’s dress that she’s wearing, but we can’t prove it.”
“This is from a video shoot from one of our songs called ‘Picture This.’ For me, I like that she’s isolated in the image. It’s something a little about the fame syndrome—it’s kind of isolating in a way.”
“She made this dress out of a bedspread or something like that and we found the backdrop which matched it. These shots were actually in Creem magazine very early on. Before anyone had heard the music, people were seeing images of Debbie frequently. It wasn’t like today where everything was very fast. It took a long time to get things out in the world. This was taken in our loft on the Bowery, which is right across from where the New Museum is now.”
“This was taken really early on. It was during the idiot tour with Iggy Pop in 1977. Bowie, who was a huge star then, was backing Iggy up and offering support playing keyboards in his band, so that was kind of a big deal. I think they both wanted to get out around America and see the punk scene that was emerging that year, too. He didn’t know about my photography skills at the time, so I was only able to get two shots of him.”
“This is Debbie in a vintage motorcycle jacket from a shop on Santa Monica Boulevard. To me, this talks mostly about the fashion. In those days, you couldn’t just walk into any store and buy a motorcycle jacket. The fashion world hadn’t caught up with punk rock yet then. She probably still has it.”
“That’s from one of the U.K. tabloids, The Sun. To a certain extent, tabloid journalism was invented in the U.K. When I was a kid, The National Enquirer was about car crashes and murder. It wasn’t about celebrities screwing up. I don’t know when the transition was, but I feel like the tabloid mentality existed in the U.K. first.”
“This is in the Bowery apartment, too. That’s a Stephen Sprouse dress—it’s one of his early creations. He moved upstairs from us and was kind of our roommate. It’s a shame he didn’t last longer. He would have been very mainstream at this point if he had survived.”
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