Joe Stevens, who, after wearying of a hectic career as a road manager for the Byrds and the Lovin’ Spoonful, transformed into a celebrated rock photographer who chronicled the golden era of amplified rebellion from Woodstock to the Sex Pistols and beyond, died on Aug. 26 in Concord, N.H. He was 87.

His death, at a skilled nursing facility, was confirmed by Jane Tyska, a friend and fellow photojournalist who was his caretaker.

A wry, low-key New Yorker, Mr. Stevens moved naturally — sometimes seemingly invisibly — in elite rock circles, which helped him capture intimate portraits of stars at unguarded moments backstage, in hotel rooms or in smoky nightclubs.

“At some post-gig party or music business reception, you would suddenly realize that Joe had been tucked away behind a pillar for most of the occasion, steadfastly snapping away,” Chris Salewicz, a prominent rock journalist and author, said in an email.

Mr. Salewicz worked with Mr. Stevens at the British music bible New Musical Express, where Mr. Stevens spent much of the 1970s as a staff photographer after moving to London early in the decade.

“I wasn’t intimidated by stardom,” Mr. Stevens said in a 2007 interview with the music site Pitchfork. “I’d already been around all the big shots. And I saw that they were just like you and I, no big deal. They just happened to be unbelievable sometimes when they get onstage or make a record. The rest of the time, boring, like the rest of us.”

Mr. Stevens broke the halo of stardom with shots of, for example, Paul McCartney wearily burying his head in the arms of his wife, Linda, during a pot bust in Sweden in 1972 and Rod Stewart seeming stage-ready while exiting the men’s room at a New York nightclub.

Other memorable images included John Lennon and Yoko Ono looking like humble street protesters at a 1971 demonstration and Mr. Stevens’s friend David Bowie, visibly exhausted and chatting with a railway porter in Paris in 1973 after a grueling boat and train journey from Japan. (He was afraid of flying.)

When punk rock swept London in the mid-1970s, Mr. Stevens became a leading chronicler of the scene. His first encounter with the music of anarchy came through the Sex Pistols’ manager, Malcolm McLaren, whom he knew only as the proprietor, with the designer Vivienne Westwood, of a fetish wear shop called Sex.

“One day, McLaren came barreling into my flat with these fliers that said ‘Sex Pistols — Live at Logan’s Loft,’” he recalled in a 2014 interview published on Seacoast Online, a New Hampshire news site.

“I had no idea it was a band,” he added. “I thought maybe it was a vibrator show. You know, like a Tupperware party.”

Soon enough, Mr. Stevens became a fixture in punk circles, and in 1978 he was there for the only American tour the Sex Pistols made during their heyday, a brief and chaotic run largely focused on honky-tonk bars in the South.

Not long after, he moved back to New York, where he photographed the Ramones, Blondie and others in the orbit of CBGB, the Bowery club that served as a punk epicenter. He found punk a visually striking alternative to the glam-rock clichés of the early ’70s.

“I was bored with the platform shoes and choreographed shows,” he said.

Joseph Stevens Grady was born on July 25, 1938, in the Bronx, to Joseph Clifford Grady, an art appraiser and boxing coach, and Anne (McPhilips) Grady. His parents divorced when he was 5, and he was raised primarily by his mother in Queens.

“We lived in basements,” he told Pitchfork. “She was a waitress, she raised me on tips.”

He gravitated toward Greenwich Village in his early 20s and eventually managed a coffeehouse there called the Playhouse, where he mingled with local folk singers like Phil Ochs, Fred Neil and John Sebastian, who would later hire him to hoist amplifiers and organize expenses for his band, the Lovin’ Spoonful.

During an extended stay in Los Angeles, Mr. Stevens hung out with bands like the Byrds, who asked him to serve as their road manager. He later worked in the same capacity for Miriam Makeba, the South African singer and activist.

During tours, he began to envy the photographer Henry Diltz, an occasional roommate, who would drop off his film canisters at the end of the day and head to the bar.

“I said, ‘Wow, that’s a good gig!,’” Mr. Stevens told Pitchfork. “I had all the headaches, people getting busted, girlfriends, diseases. I had to worry about all that stuff. And he’d just sort of say, ‘I hope there’s some nice girls downstairs.’”

Mr. Stevens had been snapping musicians as a hobby since his Playhouse days, and in the summer of 1969 he headed off with three Leica cameras to Woodstock.

Once there, he ran across from Jim Marshall, a top rock photographer he knew from his cafe, and talked him into wrangling a press pass for him. “That gave me my life,” Mr. Stevens said in a 2012 video interview. “I’ve been doing photography ever since.”

Initially, Mr. Stevens took a standard photojournalist route, starting with a staff job at The East Village Other, an influential underground newspaper, covering the Chicago Seven trial, Black Panther rallies and women’s rights marches.

After moving to England, he worked for another alternative newspaper, International Times. While covering the sectarian violence known as the Troubles in Northern Ireland in 1971, he was jailed on arson charges after authorities captured him fleeing the scene of a firebombing.

He was acquitted after a three-month trial, but he concluded that cadging backstage passes was preferable to dodging bullets, so he veered into the field where he would be a standout through the 1980s.

By the end of that decade, he had grown weary of the rock grind and opted for a quieter life in Portsmouth, N.H., where he worked as a bartender, took up sailing and occasionally took photos for local newspapers.

Mr. Stevens was married and divorced twice. He leaves no immediate survivors.

Though he spent decades in the midst of rock’s endless mutations, Mr. Stevens also kept a healthy remove.

“I wasn’t a punk myself,” he said. “I wasn’t a beatnik, I wasn’t a hippie, a rock ’n’ roller — none of that. But I shot all those scenes.

“I wasn’t a follower. I was a photographer.”