About the Artist
David Godlis, who is best known by his last name, GODLIS, is a photographer and artist who captured iconic images of the original punk rock scene at CBGB on New York City’s Bowery in the 1970’s. That scene included Blondie, The Ramones, Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Talking Heads, and Television. And GODLIS has great photographs of them all, inside and outside of CBGB on the Bowery. His music photography ranges from the Rolling Stones, to the Cramps, to Yo La Tengo.
Starting out as a street photographer, inspired by mid 20th century figures like Diane Arbus, Garry WInogrand, and Weegee, he was particularly influenced by Brassai’s Paris by Night (1933) to take nighttime images using only natural light. It was this technique that secured now-historic photographs of 1970’s punk bands and other artists on that scene, pictured in his 2016 book History Is Made At Night (with an introduction by Jim Jarmusch). His street photographs have recently been published in two books, GODLIS Streets (2020) and GODLIS Miami (2021). His photographs have been widely exhibited and published internationally. He was the subject of a short animated documentary, Shots in the Dark, directed in 2021 by Noah and Lewie Kloster, and shown at the NY Film Festival that year.
GODLIS has also been photographing for the New York Film Festival for forty years, where he has been the unofficial official photographer. His photographs from there include portraits of renowned International FIlm Directors, (as well as actors and actresses), including Martin Scorsese, Jim Jarmusch, Jean-Luc Godard, Paul Thomas Anderson, Wong Kar-wai, Spike Lee, Wes Anderson, Pedro Almodovar, David Lynch, Wim Wenders, Agnes Varda, Richard Linklater, and Peter Bogdanovich.
