In 1977, a 17-year-old Ed Rosenbaum decided to take along a Pentax manual camera he’d been given by his brother-in-law to rock-and-roll concerts he attended with friends at New York City venues like the Palladium, CBGB, and Madison Square Garden. Over the next several years, Rosenbaum captured many of the rock-and-roll icons of the period, including David Bowie, Lou Reed, Bruce Springsteen, Queen, and the Pretenders. The fact that he took all of these riveting photos from the floor—and, in many cases, from seats far away from the stage—is a testament to his eye and enthusiasm for the acts he documented. In the early ’80s, after a brief stint as a road manager for a friend’s band, Rosenbaum left music and photography behind, eventually finding a job as a doorman in an apartment building in downtown New York, where Rosenbaum has worked for the past several decades. Several years ago, he came across a box of negatives of these photographs and happened to show them to one of the building’s residents, a student at New York University who contacted Esopus in 2015.

Ed Rosenbaum was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. Many of his photographs of rock-and-roll legends were featured in Golden Years, Esopus's Fall 2016 limited-edition artwork for Premium subscribers. They were also presented in an exhibition curated by Esopus editor Tod Lippy at Brooklyn's Pioneer Works in the fall of 2016. Rosenbaum is represented by One Mile Gallery in Kingston, New York.