“That was outside of Shellow’s Luncheonette. I lined them up against this white wall, and everybody was just cracking up at that time. Bruce was telling some jokes, Steven Van Zandt was rolling his eyes, and every time Steven was rolling his eyes, Bruce would crack up. It was a spontaneous and contagious laugh fest that was going on. We could not keep straight…

I just said, ‘Alright, let’s just shoot it.’ And everybody was laughing. But when I printed the picture, I realized there was a parking meter in the lower right quadrant of the photograph. And when I started looking at the parking meter, it looked like it had a smile on its face. So it was called ‘The Smiling Parking Meter,’ that shot.” ~Frank Stefanko, photographer

Stefanko was introduced to Springsteen through Patti Smith, a college friend of the photographer’s. He recalls when Springsteen first came over to his home in Haddonfield, New Jersey, before they started formally working together. “We came from blue collar working-class families,” Stefanko says of their similar backgrounds. “Each of our mothers were Italian, and our fathers were not Italian. We loved everything about Jersey; we loved the same music. So there was a great comfort level there. He could’ve been my brother.”

“I was going for that gang camaraderie. You don’t get seven people in a booth like that~ it’s just not done. And Bruce is smiling. It was part of the ambiance of that quaint old luncheonette.” ~Frank Stefanko

 

“His photos had a purity and street poetry to them,” Springsteen wrote of Stefanko’s photographic style in his 2016 memoir Born to Run. “His pictures captured the people I was writing about in my songs and showed me the part of me that was still one of them. We had other cover options but they didn’t have the hungriness of Frank’s pictures.” Of their working relationship during those photo sessions, Stefanko describes it as a collaboration. “It wasn’t me telling him exactly what to do, or him telling me exactly what to do, or him telling me exactly what to do. It was pretty much a 50-50 mix in that working arrangement.” ~Rolling Stone magazine