$ 40
Order from the powerHouse Shop
Available April 2013
Scene is a remarkable compendium of portraits of renowned personalities from arguably the most exciting era of New York City underground culture, the 80s—a veritable time capsule of NYC when the young and indomitable flocked downtown in search of places to work and live among like-minded collaborators.
by Jeannette Montgomery Barron
Portraits / 80s Downtown / Art Stars
Hardcover
9.25 x 11.75 inches
136 pages
ISBN: 978-1-57687-624-4
$40.00 | $46.00 CAD
Available April 2013
“We look so young. We were so young.”
—Rene Ricard
Scene is a remarkable compendium of portraits of renowned personalities from arguably the most exciting era of New York City underground culture, the 80s—a veritable time capsule of NYC 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, and made their own rules, and changed our culture, as we know it, forever.
Scene is photographer Jeannette Montgomery Barron’s album of that exciting and innovative era; her life in New York in the 80s was filled with the early light of dawn after nights spent dancing at Area, the Palladium, or the Mudd Club, vodka and cigarette-fueled dinners at the Odeon, salon-style lunches at Andy Warhol’s Factory, and mornings working out at the gym with Bianca Jagger. Montgomery Barron’s first portrait of Francesco Clemente was followed soon after by one of Andy Warhol, which led to portraits of friends Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. In rapid succession, she photographed all the icons and luminaries of the era including Willem Dafoe, Julian Schnabel, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jenny Holzer, Cindy Sherman, Kathryn Bigelow, George Condo, William Burroughs, and many more.
Scene is a beautiful collection of fragile young souls, fearless in their desire to remake the nightlife and the art world in their likeness, and a poignant memento of those lost too early.
Jeannette Montgomery Barron was born in 1956 in Atlanta and studied at the International Center of Photography in New York. 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). She is also the author of Photographs and Poems, a collaboration with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jorie Graham (Scalo, 1998), Mirrors (Holzwarth Editions, 2004), Session with Keith Haring, and My Mother’s Clothes (Welcome Books, 2010). Montgomery Barron’s photographs were published in Interview, Vanity Fair, Details, and Vogue, in gallery catalogs, and museum catalogs. Her works are in numerous public and corporate collections, including The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Kunsthaus, Zurich; and The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh.
