“We didn’t have the right paper,” Antoniou recalled in a recent interview with the Globe. “It looked bad.”
All these years later, the photographer is set to publish his first true book, “Rock to Baroque: Four Decades of Music Photography,” an elegantly designed coffee table hardcover that showcases his career’s work (on high-quality glossy paper). A launch party takes place on Thursday at Panopticon Gallery in the Hotel Commonwealth, kicking off an exhibit that runs through June 30.
Antoniou, who freelanced for the Globe for several years around 1990 (and again, more recently, for the Globe Magazine), began taking photos at music shows after coming to Boston from his native Greece in the early 1980s.
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“My first camera was point-and-shoot,” Antoniou says, “and I started listening to music from a very young age. It was a dual passion.”
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Some of his family elders had already resettled in the Boston area, including two great-uncles who opened the Model Cafe, the classic Allston barroom, almost 100 years ago. In Greece, he had to get the local music shop owner to make tape recordings of albums by his favorite bands — Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, AC/DC — since he didn’t have a turntable. In Boston, the concert calendar overflowed, from great local groups to international superstars.
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As a student at the New England School of Photography, Antoniou began getting assignments to shoot live shows for the Globe. He can’t recall the first one, but he does remember snapping pictures of Timothy Leary during an appearance at Catch a Rising Star, the former Cambridge comedy club.
The first photo in the book is a 1985 performance shot of the Irish songwriter and guitarist Rory Gallagher, who was a huge star across Europe, but not in the United States.
“I couldn’t believe he was playing at the Paradise for 300 people,” Antoniou says.
For the next handful of years, he photographed some of the world’s biggest rock bands — the Rolling Stones, the Who, Fleetwood Mac, David Bowie — for the Globe, as well as country artists (Steve Earle), jazz musicians (Sonny Rollins), rappers (Public Enemy), and plenty more.
He was there for the show that Roy Orbison played at the Channel in December 1988, capping off a big comeback year for the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer. Three days later, Orbison died of a heart attack at age 52.
The Associated Press picked up his photo, “and it went everywhere,” he says. “I was 23 years old.”
For the Globe and later the Boston Phoenix, Antoniou also shot hundreds of portraits of the city’s homegrown bands and musicians, among them Morphine, Tracy Chapman, the Dropkick Murphys, Buffalo Tom, Aimee Mann, and Juliana Hatfield. One image in the book focuses on a steel guitar in the hands of the late blues guitarist Kenny Holladay, who busked on the streets around Harvard Square.
“He was amazing,” Antoniou says, “but he never made it [in the music business].”
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With a prologue written by Robert Pinsky, the former US poet laureate, the book includes captions provided by Jim Sullivan, the former Globe rock critic, as well as Ted Drozdowski, Jon Garelick, Lloyd Schwartz, and others. Some of the captions come from reviews or interviews written at the time of the concerts; others are recollections.
According to Antoniou, concert photography grew more restrictive with the establishment of the “three song” rule, which requires professional photographers to leave after the first three songs of the show. The rule is often attributed to Bruce Springsteen, but he says it may have been Hall and Oates.
In any case, easy access and backstage passes are no longer part of the perks of being a concert photographer. Beyond Boston, Antoniou’s work has been published in Rolling Stone, People magazine, and The New York Times. He has taken pictures of Mike Dukakis, Bill Clinton, and the late Paul Tsongas on the presidential campaign trail, during protests at the time of the first Gulf War and following the murder of George Floyd, and inside the world of the homeless population of his adopted city.
One of his favorite photos is the one he took of Jim Morrison’s tombstone in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. As a rock-obsessed teenager in the mountain village where he grew up in Greece, he was enamored with the Doors, whose lead singer liked to reference Greek mythology.
The tombstone bears the Greek phrase “kata ton daimona eautou.” It translates roughly as “true to his own spirit.”
James Sullivan can be reached at jamesgsullivan@gmail.com.
James Sullivan can be reached at jamesgsullivan@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @sullivanjames.
