photo credit: Marcia Resnick (Courtesy Clic Gallery)

Before there was a luxury high rise on Astor Place or competing frozen yogurt businesses on St. Mark’s, lower Manhattan was home to Andy Warhol, The Rolling Stones and The Ramones.

Photos from this anarchic time in art are being shown in an exhibit, Bande a Part: New York Underground ’60s, ’70s, ’80s at the Clic Gallery in Soho located at 424 Broome Street. The photos were taken before many of the artists knew they were going to be famous by photographers who were simply names on the scene — like Roberta Bayley who was one of the door people at CBGB, or Billy Name who had a short romance and close friendship with Andy Warhol — proving all the more that sometimes art chooses you.

photo credit: Anton Perich (Courtesy Clic Gallery)

Photos in the exhibit range from a photo of Bebe Buell and Liv Tyler as a young young girl with a pink plastic pony in a pink bathing suit by Marcia Resnick, to a portrait of Lou Reed sitting on a couch. In the photo by Anton Perich, who was a contributor for Warhol’s Interview magazine, Reed’s eyes gaze down either to the joint in his hands or to his empty drink on the floor.

Instead of being posed, each photo is captured time. Billy Name caught Andy Warhol candidly in a shot with one of his flower paintings, while Marcia Resnick caught him mid-bite out at dinner with Mick Jagger and William Burroughs.

Bobby Grossman caught Jack Curtis and David Bowie through the bars of a fire escape, while Roberta Bayley snapped a picture of Joey Ramone heading out to catch a few rides on the beach at Coney Island, and another of Debbie Harry putting on makeup backstage while drinking a Heineken.

A few of the photos have a flair for the comical and the dramatic, like the one Stephanie Czernikowski took of Iggy Pop with his hands down his pants and an impish grin, or the one Marcia Resnick took of Johnny Thunders in a bathtub at the Grammercy Park Hotel, shirtless with his fly undone, his tattoos proclaiming “mom” and “too fast to live too young to die.”

All pieces in the exhibit are for sale. They range from $1,200 to $4,750 for a collage of photos of The Rolling Stones by Danny Fields, but admission to see them is free.