“She would make a great cover story,” said photographer Martyn Goddard in early 1978, over drinks with Alex Low and Geoff Axbey, respectively the picture editor and art director of The Telegraph Sunday Magazine. He was pitching Debbie Harry, a rising star of the New Wave scene with her band, Blondie. The magazine’s “tyrannical” editor, John Astey, wasn’t convinced. He wanted to see the pictures first. Goddard secured the assignment only by paying for his own flight to New York.
Chrysalis Records agreed to cover his hotel expenses at the Gramercy Park Hotel, where Harry and the guitarist Chris Stein were staying. When Goddard checked in that May, he discovered the hotel’s storied guest list: Bob Dylan, David Bowie, the Clash. “It was the kind of place bands stayed on their way up and on their way down,” he remembers a barman telling him.
For Blondie, that summer was all the way up—the moment the cult pop-punk band began its transformation into a mainstream sensation with Parallel Lines, the album that would carry “Heart of Glass” to the top of the charts that August.
Fresh out of Harrow College of Art, in 1974 the young photographer had never been to New York. Suddenly he was shooting Blondie live at the Palladium, staging rooftop sessions in Beatles fashion, and riding their limo to loft parties, where he shyly snapped Andy Warhol, Dave Edmunds, and Nick Lowe with his tiny Minox camera. He even joined the band on a night out at Studio 54.
When he returned to London in July, Goddard brought back more than 40 rolls of film. Once developed, the images were irresistible. The cover did run—on August 6, 1978. It was a close-up of Harry: glittery blue eye shadow, blond hair falling over one eye.
A week later, an exhibition followed at the Mirandy Gallery, on Glentworth Street, featuring 51 prints and six life-size cutouts of Harry. On opening night, August 14, some 500 people surrounded Blondie’s Daimler limousine. The cutouts were promptly stolen.
All the prints—including photos of the stolen cutouts—are now collected in Goddard’s new book, Blondie in Camera 1978, a vivid memoir of what one might call “the summer Goddard turned groupie.”
Reflecting on Blondie’s enduring allure, Goddard says, “When I boarded the plane in May 1978 to photograph Debbie Harry in New York, I could not have conceived that there would still be a demand for my images 45 years later.” —Carolina de Armas
“Blondie in Camera 1978,” a companion exhibition of Martyn Goddard’s photographs of Blondie, is on at the Barbican Music Library, in London, until January 5, 2026
Carolina de Armas is a Junior Editor at Air Mail
