Scene

Scene collects Jeannette Montgomery Barron's portraits of the artists, musicians, and downtown regulars who defined New York's early-1980s underground, a record of a social world made from the inside rather than observed at a distance.

Published by powerHouse Books in 2013, the hardcover pairs Montgomery Barron's close, plainly lit portraits, made between roughly 1983 and 1987, with brief recollections of the nightclubs and restaurants where the pictures were taken: Area, the Palladium, the Mudd Club, Warhol's Factory, and the Odeon. Her subjects include Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, William Burroughs, and Willem Dafoe, most photographed as friends and peers rather than as sitters for a formal commission.

Montgomery Barron worked alongside her subjects rather than around them, and Scene reads less like a survey of famous names than a photo album kept by someone who knew everyone in the room. Three decades later, the book stands as an intimate visual record of a downtown scene that has since become historical shorthand for the era.