Rock Photos Revived at Image Flow

Bill Green has youthful persistence to thank for putting him in the center of the New York City music scene in the early 1970s, his camera held high in front of some of the most famous names in music.

But his gratitude lies with serendipity and technology for saving his remarkable photos of that era from the dustbins of history. His collection of rock photos gets an encore at the on Miller Ave. starting Saturday.

Green, 53, thrust himself into the world of rock music at just 15 years old in the early 1970s. He frequented the Academy of Music, the old vaudeville theater on E. 14th Street in New York City where promoter Howard Stein was bringing in a who’s who list of rock musicians every night, including artists as diverse as Alice Cooper, Black Sabbath, The Grateful Dead, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Genesis, Hot Tuna and Iggy Pop.

“I used to sneak into those shows when I was 14, run up and snap a photo and get thrown out,” said the 53-year-old Green, who is married to clothier Margaret O’Leary.

He eventually got up the courage to seek out Stein himself, sitting outside his office for days on end until he finally caught his eye, showing him a photo he took of bluesman Johnny Winter. Stein liked what he saw and invited Green to be his house photographer, coming to every show and taking photos.

Green found himself training his lens on rock legends on a regular basis and was hooked.

“It became a pursuit of capturing in two dimensions something that only happens on the audio plain,” he said. “How do you capture two hours in one frame that can be viewed later in two dimensions?”

But Green set down his camera in 1976, stashing more than 10,000 negatives in his parent’s attic in New York. He moved to the Bay Area in 1979, and was living in the South of Market area of San Francisco when a huge fire burnt his building to the ground, taking Green’s entire catalog of physical prints with it.

“Over the years it became increasingly difficult to think about going to a darkroom and reprinting those photos,” Green said.

Then Green met , who has built his fledgling business around the power of technology to give digital photos a physical platform. Schwartz showed Green that the negatives could be printed in a way that wouldn’t appear as “digital parodies of the original photos. When I realized that I could restore the photos as if I were in a traditional wet darkroom, I was really inspired,” Green said.

The pair spent the past year pulling those negatives out of boxes – all 10,000 of them.

“We’d just keep saying, ‘oh my god, look at this one,’” Green said of the discoveries. “It has been a remarkable experience. It also represents a completion of the circle. Had I not done this with Stuart, this work would have languished in an attic.”

The 411: "Academy of Music: The Hidden Photo Archive of Bill Green" opens at The Image Flow (401 Miller Ave., Suite F) on Saturday, Sept. 10 at 6 p.m.