Collection: David Godlis

David Godlis, who is best known by his last name GODLIS, has been photographing in New York City since 1976. A “street photographer” in the style of Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand, he wandered into the nightclub CBGB’s one night, and has become known for his photographs of the NYC Punk scene. GODLIS, who shot in the style of photographers Brassai and Robert Frank, used his handheld Leica camera and Tri-X film to capture his subjects by the natural light of the Bowery outside as well as inside the club CBGB’s.

His book of those photographs, HISTORY IS MADE AT NIGHT, artistically documented that club between the years 1976 and1979, when Patti Smith, The Ramones, Blondie, Richard Hell, Talking Heads and Television ruled the Bowery. Since the late 1980’s, GODLIS has been shooting the New York Film Festival, where he has been the unofficial official photographer for the last 25 years. Now thoroughly enmeshed in the digital world with a FUJI X camera, he shoots assignments and exhibits his photographs internationally.

This year GODLIS played a cameo roll as a photographer in Alex Ross Perry’s new film Her Smell, starring Elisabeth Moss as a punk rocker, which played at the 2018 NY Film Festival and is to be released in 2019.