David Godlis ,New Book photographs, Rock & Roll, Punk 'History is Made at Night'

David Godlis couldn’t believe it the night that Robert Frank walked into CBGB.“I was hanging out around the door and I thought, oh my god, that’s Robert Frank,” he says. “For me, that was the biggest thing that could happen, because I had studied photography and he was one of my idols.”Godlis says that from the moment he walked into CBGB, which was soon after he arrived in New York, he started thinking about doing a photo book. His inspiration was Brassai’s black-and-white photographs of Paris’s nightlife in the 1930s. “I thought, this place is so crazy and so cool, I should be taking pictures here, even though I’m a street photographer who shoots with natural light during the day. I wondered if I could be a street photographer shooting by natural light at night.”More than 35 years later, his book about CBGB, History Is Made at Night: Photographs 1976-1979, is finally here. Godlis showed the work to publishers over the years, but no one was interested in the grainy images, shot with long exposures instead of flash. “Punk photography was all flash, and this wasn’t,” he says. “And it wasn’t really a music book either, so they didn’t know what to do with it.”In the new book’s introduction, filmmaker Jim Jarmusch notes that night people are different from those who prefer the clarity of day. “At night the edges lose definition,” he writes. “In the city every corner or recess, doorway or alley becomes mysterious, alive with a constantly shifting variety of possibilities. One must be ready for them. Living at night requires imagination. In NYC in 1976 it was necessary just for survival. ”Godlis survived to tell the tale . One day something is old news and the next it’s legend. Sometimes success means waiting long enough to be on the right side of history.