In 1977, Ed Rosenbaum, a 17-year-old born and raised in Brooklyn, decided to bring along a Pentax manual camera he’d been given by his brother-in-law to rock-and-roll concerts he attended with friends at New York City venues like the Palladium, CBGB, and Madison Square Garden. “It was a way to remember the shows you went to,” he recalls. Over the course of the next several years, Ed captured many of the rock-and-roll icons of the period, including Davie Bowie, Lou Reed, Bruce Springsteen, Queen, and the Pretenders. The fact that he took all of these riveting photos from the floor—in many cases, from seats far away from the stage—is a testament to both his eye and his enthusiasm for the acts he documented.

In the early ’80s, after a brief stint as a road manager for a friend’s band, Ed left music and photography behind, eventually finding a job as a doorman in an apartment building in downtown New York, where he has worked for the past several decades. Several years ago, he came across a box of negatives of these photographs and happened to show them to one of the building’s residents, a student at New York University who told me about them when I lectured to her class in 2015. This exhibition features a selection of photographs that appear in Golden Years, a 56-page, clothbound book published by the Esopus Foundation Ltd. as the 2016 Esopus Premium Subscribers Edition.