Photographer Jeannette Montgomery Barron captured the brief, rich moment when Warhol and Basquiat were close friends, working side-by-side. Her photographs are now the subject of the limited-edition book “JMB.”
Portrait photographer Jeannette Montgomery Barron new book features images of fast friends and artistic collaborators Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat from 1984 and 1985 — before they stopped being friends.
The pictures showcases their lives and friendship up until their deaths, which happened within a year of each other, in 1987 and 1988, respectively.
Barron said she remembered the two photo sessions in detail. There were no tantrums, or diva behavior.
“They were just starting to work together, and you could tell they adored each other, as friends and as collaborators,” said the softly spoken Barron in a telephone interview.
“Andy was getting a lot of wind in his sails at the time. He was riding high and always looking for new inspiration, new young people from out of town or from Europe. That’s where he got a lot of ideas and inspiration,” the photographer added.
Barron had been invited to shoot the artists by the Swiss art dealer and collector Bruno Bischofberger, who was close to both.
She photographed Basquiat in December 1984 at the artist’s Great Jones Street studio in New York City. Her only props were a birdcage, a chair and an unfinished painting. She shot three rolls of 120 film — 36 images — layering light and shadows in her signature black-and-white.
“It was early evening, in the winter, so it was dark already. And I was the only one there — no one else was in the studio. I’m pretty minimal, too. I don’t bring a lot of equipment, or work with assistants. I feel that just messes up my correspondence with the subject. I want to be the only one” interacting with them, she said.
Basquiat, whose star was still on the rise, “was really sweet and very accommodating. I don’t think we talked much at all. He liked the images, and so did Bruno,” she said.
Warhol was a slightly different story.
Barron knew him already and had photographed him before.
“I knew the Factory very well so for me it was just like, ‘I’m going in, I’m going to photograph these two people, and then I’m going to leave.’ People knew I was OK, that I wasn’t going to take advantage of them, or take up their whole day, so I was allowed in.”
Barron said her approach to portrait-taking hasn’t changed.
“I’m not interested in a superficial, setup photo. Somebody else can do that better. I’m always trying to get some inner, spiritual feeling and to [discover] what these people’s souls are about. That’s what I try, although I can’t always do it,” she said.
The book features an introductory essay by Francesco Clemente, who had collaborated with Basquiat and Warhol on paintings, and was also close to Bischofberger.
In the essay, Clemente describes Barron as “an elegant woman, and an elegant photographer. She conveys the widest range of expressivity (sic.) with the minimum amount of means. The secret of her good luck is that she travels light.”
The 64-page book comes as a signed, limited edition and features the complete sittings from 1984 and 1985. It also includes six contact sheets with 24 large-format images, plus a previously unseen artwork by Basquiat.
Barron will be celebrating the book’s release — and other photography projects — at a party in Rome, where she used to live part-time.
The launch event will take place in early June at Chez Dédé, a multibrand luxury store on Via di Monserrato, not far from Campo de’Fiori, followed by a dinner at Ian Schrager’s Rome Edition hotel.
The store will also be showcasing other work by Barron, including her photographs of tabletops and mirrors, and her hand drawings.
Jeannette Montgomery Barron
Jeannette Montgomery Barron Biography Jeannette Montgomery Barron was born in Atlanta Georgia and studied at the International Center of Photography, NY, NY. She became known for her portraits of the New York art world in the 1980s, which were later published in Jeannette Montgomery Barron (Edition Bischofberger, Zurich, 1989). Her next book, Photographs and Poems (1998), a collection of her still life photographs, was a collaboration with the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jorie Graham. Mirrors (2004) includes a text by the celebrated author Edmund White. In 2006 she published Session with Keith Haring, 20 photographs taken by Jeannette Montgomery Barron in Haring’s studio one afternoon in 1985. In My Mother’s Clothes, Jeannette Montgomery Barron created a poignant portrait of her late mother through still life images of her cherished clothing, shoes, and personal possessions. As her mother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s progressed, robbing her of any remembered past, Jeannette Montgomery Barron began this unique visual album as a way of both sparking her mother’s memories, and coping with her own sense of loss. Scene (2013) is a remarkable compendium of portraits of renowned personalities from arguably the most exciting era of New York City underground culture-the 1980s-when the young and indomitable flocked downtown in search of places to work and live among like-minded collaborators. These musicians, filmmakers, painters, writers, fashion designers, publishers, actors, models, and photographers played together, worked together, made their own rules, and changed our culture, as we know it, forever. My Life in the 1980’s New York Art Scene (2014) was published in conjunction with a major exhibition of Jeanette Montgomery Barron’s work at Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy. On October 13, 2016, The American Academy in Rome opened the exhibition, A View of One’s Own: Three Women Photographer in Rome, which featured Jeannette Montgomery Barron’s photography along with Esther Boise Van Deman and Georgina Masson. The exhibition traveled to The Arthur Ross Gallery at The University of Pennsylvania and was shown there from September through December 2017. Jeannette Montgomery Barron photography is in numerous public and corporate collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Kunsthaus, Zurich; Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy; The Archivio Fotografico, American Academy in Rome and The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. She has shown internationally at Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, Zurich; Scalo, New York and Zurich; Jackson Fine Art, Atlanta; ClampArt, New York; and Magazzino D’Arte Moderna, Rome.
