The photographer who painted punk.

Byline: Serena Markstrom The Register-Guard

In the six years since free-lance photographer Eileen Polk had to put down her camera equipment because of the physical toll it was taking on her back, Polk has refocused on getting her past work out.

Polk's most noteworthy and salable photos are of music icons of the 1970s, including Sid Vicious, Debbie Harry, Frank Zappa and the Ramones. Her subjects were her friends. She was both an observer and a participant in the punk scene.

A Eugene resident since 1994, Polk has kept many of her photos private. She sold others to magazine and book publishers, and still others to individuals.

For her exhibit at Feinstein's this month, she hopes to have something for every fan of the music, including smaller prints for smaller budgets.

"Some of these are all new for this show," Polk, 52, said during a recent interview in her west Eugene home. "Some have been displayed before."

These days, Polk takes delight in watching a new generation of kids getting interested in the music and the scene she witnessed from its birth. When she sees a kid in a Misfits T-shirt at the bus station, she is right there.

"They probably look at me like I'm some crazy hippie," she said. "If they only knew."

In on punk's ground floor

Rock journalist Legs McNeil, who interviewed Polk for his book "Please Kill Me: The Secret History of Punk Music," told The Register-Guard in 2000 that Polk was a part of the scene from the beginning.

"She was the kind of person who everybody gravitated toward," he said. "She was young and cute and sexy and funny and smart, and everybody liked her. She was everybody's friend."

Polk moved west in part to care for her mother, who had Alzheimer's disease. If she hadn't been so preoccupied with that task in the early 1990s, she said she might already have sold some of her rarest photos, which have since gone up in value.

"Now, people are doing fine art books that are in color," she said of some of the invitations she's received recently to participate in books that try to set the story straight about the early days of the New York punk scene. Her photos and stories will appear in an upcoming book, "Punk Is Dead: Punk Is Everything," by Bryan Ray Turcotte.

As photography subjects and friends, Polk said she is attracted to weird people, doing weird things. As testimony to that, she chose Eugene as a place to settle and take care of her mother after she visited the Oregon Country Fair in 1990.

"This town is weird," she said she remembers thinking. `I gotta come back here.'

She shot an album cover for Nick Cave, dated Arthur Kane of the New York Dolls and snapped a shot of Neon Leon at her mom's house - Mom front and center with a dog on her lap.

In its heyday, Polk said, the punk scene was mischaracterized by the news media. And a number of artists and witnesses have sought to set the record straight.

Sure, Dee Dee Ramone had a prostitute girlfriend who kept him supplied with heroin while Polk was dating him. But there was a good side of the punk scene, too.

Take the many times when the owner of Max's Kansas City closed his joint for Christmas and invited bands that had played there and their friends to eat a free holiday meal.

Or when the kids joined forces to have a garage sale, block party, poetry reading or some other quiet performance. Polk captured these moments, too.

"Punk was trying to be something that couldn't be commodified and sold back to us," she said. "In a way, we tried to make it obnoxious so it (commodification) wouldn't happen so quickly. ...

`Every single thing that youth comes up with is co- opted."

On the road to memoir

Because she dated Ramone and Kane, some considered her a groupie. But she said she genuinely loved the music and regarded her own art as part of the scene.

She was no groupie, but they fascinated her, too, and she snapped their photos.

Now, she finds that people her age who were not allowed to go to shows at CBGB's or other birthplaces of punk are interested in collectibles from the era, including her photos.

Medical problems have sidelined her from what she called an obsession, so she's taking on a new one: writing. She'll burn through a 200-page notebook in less than a month trying to get her thoughts and memories down.

Eventually, she wants to write a memoir and publish her own book of photos. But in the meantime, she's getting her story out - one photo and one story at a time.

Polk has displayed her photos many times, and they have appeared in People magazine, Interview and Premiere. But this exhibit marks a first in at least one sense.

Among the 100 photos of icons and iconoclasts, she finally will hang a photo of herself.

EXHIBIT PREVIEW Eileen Polk photographs When: Opening reception 7 p.m. tonight; photos up through Dec. 1 Where: Feinstein's Museum of Unfine Art, 537 Willamette St. For sale: Original photos of mainly punk musicians from the New York scene, from $35 to $200