By BEN SISARIO

In December 2001, while on assignment in Tokyo, the photographer Lyle Owerko came across a funky old boombox at an outdoor market. He was struck by its bulk and intrigued by its link to a vanished New York of break dancing and graffiti .

“That’s when the obsession started,” he said recently at his studio in New York . Dozens of the machines, covered in protective Bubble Wrap, were piled in a corner. Mr. Owerko’s interest grew into a book, “The Boombox Project: The Machines, the Music, and the Urban Underground.”

It features his closeup photographs of vintage portable stereos, as well as commentary by Spike Lee, L L Cool J and members of the Beastie Boys and the Fugees about the role the devices played in New York’s street culture from the late 1970s to the mid- ‘80s. Mr. Owerko - best known for his image of the smashed World Trade Center on the cover of Time magazine on September 14, 2001 - venerates an audio technology that, to eyes accustomed to the iPod’s futuristic smoothness, seems practically steampunk: hard, square-edged metal casing; wheel-size speakers ; lots of clunky knobs and buttons.

And at the heart of every boombox is a cassette deck. Mr. Owerko’s book portrays the boombox as a “sonic campfire” for urban youth, a catalyst in the creation of instant, loud gatherings on subway platforms and on crowded city sidewalks.

The device became a global phenomenon, but its nicknames - ghetto blaster, Brixton briefcase ? rooted its mythology in urban black culture. Don Letts, the British-born film director who also played in the band Big Audio Dynamite, says the boombox set kids free.

“You were no longer trapped to an AC outlet,” Mr. Letts said . “You could take it to the streets, and wherever you took it, you had an instant party.” To capture what he calls “the physicality of nostalgia,” Mr. Owerko experimented . “Initially they just looked like product photographs when I lit them really nice,” he said. “It was boring.

Then I found that when I amplified the scratches and dirt and grunge on them, their character came through. ” “The Boombox Project” also tracks the development of the stereos’ design, from their relatively compact origins to monstrosities like Sharp’s four-speaker, 12-kilogram GF-777, as manufacturers saw how they were being adopted by young people as totems of power .

The boombox - from its introduction in the mid-1970s to its decline in the ‘90s, when hip-hop went mainstream ? represents the world that then developed in the cities: rough, bold and loud. “There’s very much a Humvee aspect to it ,” Mr. Owerko said. “Because that connotes, ‘I’m roughand- tumble, I have swagger, I have presence