From Document Journal’s second issue — on sale tomorrow — comes a look back at the New York City skyline from 1977 to 1982, as captured by Edo Bertoglio and narrated by Glenn O’Brien. Bertoglio, a Swiss photographer, regularly helped with O’Brien’s public access program TV Party (it was a “cocktail party that could be a political party!”) and the two worked on Downtown 81, a movie featuring the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. During the same period, Bertoglio took snapshots of “the real monuments of the evanescent time, the wonders of our world and the glories of our landscape” on his roof, as O’Brien writes in Document, like Anna Sui, Debbie Harry, and Patti Astor.
He dubs them “the all-star team of the age: ingénues and leading ladies, starlets and strumpets, muses and genies, tarts and temptresses, divas and desperadoes, seductresses, teasers and torturers, vamps and tramps. All of them true personalities with style that ran deep. They were their own creators, their own stylists and their own designers. They didn’t buy a look or borrow one from a couturier, they conjured glamour out of thrift shops and thin air.” O’Brien adds, justly, “these pictures make me miss makeup.”
Click ahead to see Bertoglio’s photos as featured in Document.