From Warhol to Basquiat: behind a revealing set of artist portraits

In 1978, Jeannette Montgomery Barron was like any other twentysomething who moved to New York City with big dreams. After scoring an apartment in midtown, she spent her time closer to the vibrancy of downtown, becoming a photographer who captured some of the biggest luminaries of the 20th century, from Andy Warhol to William Burroughs.

Her black-and-white photo series, Artist Portraits from the 80s, was recently on show at the Patrick Parrish Gallery in New York. Over 30 portraits of downtown artists, actors and writers that defined New York’s 1980s cool were on view. The gallery is closed, but the works are still available on the gallery’s website.

What makes this series special, or different, from other photographers who defined the era? The answer: Montgomery Barron photographed most of these portraits in the intimacy of the artists’ homes.

“We’re all at home, we need to figure out how to make the best of this,” Montgomery Barron tells the Guardian. “Somebody is giving us a message here. We must learn from this, in our own quiet.”

While the photos depict stars associated with a fast-moving scene – Bianca Jagger, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring – she managed to capture them in still, serene moments.

“I like photographing people in their homes or their studios because I’d see something on their table, like a book they’re reading, and you immediately know something about them,” she says. “It’s a clue. It gives you something to talk about. That was my method of loosening people up and taking them out of themselves.”

After her move to the city, Montgomery Barron first worked as a still photographer on a low-budget film set, which led her to doing a series of artist portraits. She started out with a good friend, Francesco Clemente, who is captured in a spiritual kind of stillness, seated by a windowsill, awash in sunlight.

“He loved the photos, so he told me to photograph Keith Haring,” recalls Montgomery Barron. “I started getting phone numbers of artists and I started cold calling them, which wasn’t easy for me. But that’s how I got Basquiat and Warhol.”

The photos include a shot of Bianca Jagger, posing in an apartment for a magazine, during her raucous Studio 54 era – a far cry from her life today as a human rights activist. “I think it’s great what she is doing now, it’s a shift from then,” says Montgomery Barron. “She’s using her power to get something done, which is so admirable.”

There’s also a shot of Warhol and Basquiat seated on a couch. “They were just hanging out,” recalls Montgomery

Barron, who took the photo as a commission for an art gallery ahead of their two-man exhibition. “Andy was a looker, an observer. He liked to watch things. He didn’t talk much. With me, he was polite, but there was never much chit-chat. He was always busy looking.”

The series includes rare, and striking, high-contrast photos from Basquiat’s studio on Bond Street. “It was the height of his career and he clearly had a drug problem,” she recalls. “He was really edgy that night. A few people came in and went off into another room, then he seemed much calmer. I saw him at parties, he was kind of shy.”

She managed to capture some of the most poignant political artists of our time. There’s a photo of artist Leon Golub in his home studio. “I remember having a really long visit with Leon and his wife, it’s almost as if they were relatives, or something,” says Montgomery Barron. “His personality was nothing like his paintings, from what I can tell. He was like an uncle.”

There’s also a photo of political artist Barbara Kruger in a pair of slouch socks, seated at home. “I learned about her past, her life before becoming an artist, as a magazine designer,” says Montgomery Barron. “That’s what I love about doing this portrait series, I learned about her life.

One of the earliest photos in the series is a photo of Haring in his studio. “That was one of the easiest shoots I ever did, I walked in, the walls were all painted with his art, and he just did the right thing, he plopped up where he was sitting and just went through all the motions,” she recalls.

One of the toughest? Burroughs in 1985, photographed on his 71st birthday. Just outside of the picture frame, a collection of shotguns sat on a nearby table. “He was creating his shotgun paintings in that apartment,” she says. “I was a little bit spooked by him. I didn’t understand he was making shotgun paintings and thought, ‘Oh my God.’ I was a bit naive. I soon realized he was making art with the shotguns.”

Montgomery Barron used a clunky Hasselblad 500C/M, a medium-format camera, for these shots (the camera was in production from the 1970s to the 1990s). She tried to keep the shoots as simple as possible. “I’m not very intimidating when I walk in the room, I don’t bring a lot of stuff, I don’t have an assistant,” she says. “I didn’t stay long, either.” She now lives in Connecticut after spending a decade in Italy.

Probably the most intimidating person she shot was the controversial photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. “It took me years to track him down, and after I finally got up the courage to phone him, he said yes,” she recalls. “It was challenging to shoot another photographer you admire. I thought, he’s going to think I’m a fake; I’m not holding the camera right, I don’t know anything about lighting.”

Alas, it all worked out in Mapplethorpe’s apartment on 23rd Street. “He put me at ease. I knew he was sick at that point,” she says of his Aids diagnosis. “I wish I got to know him better.”

Each photo has an essence that Montgomery Barron tried to capture. “I try to draw something out of them,” she says, “something that’s the essence of them, not a caricature.”

It also shows a creative and experimental side of New York but also one that struggled financially.

“In the late 1970s, the city was in bad shape. It was dangerous. Everything was falling apart – the subway, the roads.

“Then Wall Street boomed, there were drugs – yahoo, let’s just make money! That’s just what we just went through too. There was so much money, and then boom: we got to change.”

degree. But the world of work quickly proved to be overrated.

“The first time I got a job in an office. I thought, ‘Wow, this will be great’ – because I’d only ever worked at the fast food chain Jack in the Box and in construction. But then I was like, ‘This is not great – in fact, it might be worse.’ I was alphabetising purchase orders! So