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b'Though Harry is the breathtaking face and indelible voice of Blondie, she will be the first to acknowledge Stein\\u2019s central role in the development of the band as\\xa0songwriter, guitarist, and visionary thinker. As Harry has said, \\u201cThe singer is always a recognizable factor but oddly I don\\u2019t think Chris gets noticed as a guitarist. His musicality and the way he plays guitar is really an underlying strong part of Blondie.\\u201cWe were living very much in the moment,\\u201d says Chris Stein of his early days in Blondie as he discusses the trove of photographs he\\u2019s taken since the start of the seventies. Though best known as an innovative guitarist and groundbreaking songwriter, this Roll Hall of Fame inductee has been equally passionate about, and devoted to, photography. The proof of his acuity as a visual artist is in ample evidence throughout his beautifully rendered coffee-table book, Negative \\u2013 Me, Blondie and the Advent of Punk, which documents his life back stage, off stage, on the road and at home. Looking at the images, many of them printed in evocative black and white, he says, \\u201cThere is time travel-esque quality to it, of freezing a moment in time. There really isn\\u2019t another art form that does that.\\u201dThe cross- currents of Stein\\u2019s multi-cultural pursuits are all on display in Negative, along with images of seminal figures from the seventies and eighties whom he had befriended: artist Jean Michel Basquiat, designer Stephen Sprouse, hip hop personality Fab Five Freddy Braithwaite,\\xa0 saxophonist \\xa0James Chance and his muse Anya Phillips, and, of course, Andy Warhol.\\xa0Above all, Negative \\u2013as with so much of the music of Blondie \\u2013 is a paean to the most enduring creative relationship in pop music: the collaboration between Harry and Stein. \\xa0It was Stein was gave the world its first photographic glimpses of that ravishing, now iconic face.'