Five Decades of MUSIC
According to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame & Museum, Anastasia Pantsios has been photographing and writing about the entire length of the Cleveland Music Scene, uninterrupted, since 1972, through the 80s, 90s, 2000s, 10s, 20s into today. "That's half a century of rock history," says Greg Harris, Rock Hall President and CEO. In roles as a writer and editor at Cleveland Plain Dealer, EXIT Magazine, Free Times, Cleveland Scene, and Cool Cleveland, Anastasia's coverage of major acts and musicians from Cleveland and Akron helped many bands and individual artists break out and reach wider audiences, particularly as she proactively submitted her images to national publications like Rolling Stone, Creem, and more.
In 2011, Pantsios' image collection of female artists debuted at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum as an exhibition called, Girls on Film: 40 Years of Women in Rock, which ran for six months. Its popularity prompted the museum to remount the exhibition in 2017 under a new title, Girls to the Front — a deeper look at the many women who shaped the music industry. While Cleveland-based artists became more prominent on rock and roll stages across Northeast Ohio, Pantsios developed a special interest in the visual study of the changing and diverse ways rock musicians presented themselves while performing music in addition to the mentorship of other female rock photographers, including Janet Macoska, Denyce Renee, Judie Vegh, and Linda Woods.
"As a woman working in a predominantly male industry, I always felt that I captured the shows differently than my male peers. The female fans seemed to feel the female artists in a deeply, more personal way. Their trials and triumphs reflected our stories too."
Due to its public popularity, this second run inspired Pantsios to compile her first published book, Girls to the Front: 40 Years of Women in Rock (2017). The book showcased her powerful portraits of female rock icons like Tina Turner, Patti Smith, Joan Jett, Grace Slick, Courtney Love, Gwen Stefani, and Stevie Nicks, documenting women's evolving roles, resilience, and cultural impact in a male-dominated genre, from the late '60s into the 21st century.
As 2027 approaches, Pantsios is preparing to mount Five Decades of Rock & Roll as a traveling exhibition to feature 53 years of photographic concert coverage, spanning every generation of musicians in rock, including the last ten years of Northeast Ohio artists. Today, Anastasia Pantsios is one of the last living Ohio journalists whose ongoing work has been published continuously over five decades.
