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, and as soon as he returned home to New York he began scouring flea markets and eBay for more of them.

“That’s when the obsession started,” he said recently at his TriBeCa studio, where 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,” published this month by Abrams Image. It features his lovingly detailed close-up 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.