Bruce Springsteen--Barbara Pyle

black and white vintage print, head and shoulders, depicting Springsteen smiling in hat and mirrored sunglasses, taken before a sound check outside the Houston Music Hall during the Born To Run tour, 13 September 1975, signed later by the photographer, 282 x 354mm., the photographer and her equipment captured reflected in Springsteen’s sunglasses, one of three of this size printed by the photographer at the time, very light creasing to each corner

Barbara Pyle’s photography has been featured on the cover of Time magazine and in the pages of numerous publications for over 30 years.  As a freelance photographer in the 1970s, Pyle had a regular assignment to shoot pictures for Schaefer Beer which led to her first encounter with Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band at the Schaefer Music Festival in Central Park, New York on 3 August 1974.  From the early 1980s onwards she forged a career as a film-maker, environmental activist, philanthropist and photographer.  Today, her work is focused on the Barbara Pyle Foundation which resulted in her being awarded the prestigious United Nations Environment Programme Sasakawa Prize, 1997.

Christopher Phillips and Louis P. Masur, Talk About A Dream, The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen (2013), illustrated within
Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band 1975: Photographs by Barbara Pyle (2015), illustrated pp.132-133

Barbara Pyle was given unprecedented access to Springsteen and The E Street Band during the rehearsals, recording and touring of Born To Run in 1975, and the resultant photographs document the group's propulsion to stardom.  As Pyle recalls "I first saw Bruce and the E Street Band by accident ... I was blown away by their music. For the next year, I drove to as many of their gigs as I could reach. They jokingly started calling me their 'official unofficial photographer.' I was just expected to be there, and I almost always was – on my self-imposed mission to document this little known New Jersey band... I had the remarkable good fortune to spend most of the last Born to Run months in the studio with Bruce and the band. I became sort of a living 'good luck' charm and was asked to be there many nights."