THREE CHORDS & TWO CAMERAS

Punk has always been more than a sound. It is a scene, a refusal, a language of urgency. Born from disillusionment and carried by those who found freedom in its noise, punk created spaces where anger, vulnerability, style, humour, and resistance could exist together. Across decades and across cities, it offered a place for people to gather outside of convention and to imagine themselves differently.

“Three Chords & Two Cameras” brings together the work of two photographers who approached punk from different eras, cities, and visual positions. Per Schorn’s long-term project The Photo Booth Book creates a temporary off-stage environment for the people who make up the international punk, hardcore, and alternative scene. Schorn built a photo booth and brought it to concerts, festivals, and venues across Germany, Belgium, and the United States. Inside this small constructed space, more than 400 musicians from over 120 bands have photographed themselves: four frames, one shot every five seconds, no instructions, no rules, no second chances. What emerges is not spectacle, but intimacy. The booth becomes a space where performance gives way to play, self-awareness, exhaustion, friendship, and quiet presence.

Michael Grecco’s photographs enter punk from another angle: the charged immediacy of live performance realised into the series, Days of Punk. Documenting the Boston punk scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Grecco captured the explosive energy of a movement at a moment when punk was still becoming visible. His photographs are charged with movement: bodies colliding, musicians mid-shout, audiences pressed close to the stage. They show punk as an immediate force, a cultural rupture unfolding in real time.

Together, Grecco and Schorn reveal punk as both action and aftermath, public intensity and private ritual. Grecco’s images place us in the crowd, close to the volume and the physicality of the scene. Schorn’s portraits pause after the noise, allowing the people who make up the scene to appear on their own terms. One camera looks toward the stage; the other creates a stage of its own.

Across Boston and Berlin, across analogue archives and contemporary self-staging, this exhibition considers how photography preserves not only the look of punk, but the spaces it made possible. These were, and remain, spaces of belonging for those who did not always find it elsewhere. Punk’s safe space was never quiet or simple. It was loud, improvised, imperfect, and fiercely alive. In these images, that energy continues to move.

About the artists

Michael Grecco

Michael Grecco is an award-winning photographer and author renowned for his high-concept imagery and powerful subject connections. He studied filmmaking and photojournalism at Boston University. While in college, Grecco documented the burgeoning music scene for the Associated Press, the Boston Herald, and local publications like Boston Rock Magazine. His work from this era captures the energy of the Boston punk explosion, showcasing the city’s pivotal cultural role. In the late 1980s, Grecco transitioned to Los Angeles, where his coverage of major events like the Golden Globes and Academy Awards for People magazine launched his prolific career as a leading celebrity portrait photographer. His extensive portfolio now spans celebrity, fine art, and advertising. When not behind the lens, he explores subcultures on his vintage motorcycles, always keeping a camera ready to capture the world around him.

Per Schorn

Per Schorn has been involved in photography since his school days, later studying communication design at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences. This background helped him develop a distinctive, imaginative style for creating images. His work is known for its sensitive and precise handling of light, which subtly helps each image tell a story that originated in his mind. Schorn’s process involves meticulously calculated staged works; nothing is left to chance, from set design and location to styling, casting, and framing. His photographic stagings are like moments stopped from a movie, inviting the viewer to dream and immerse themselves in the scenarios he has translated into photographic reality.