Wardrobe Shots, The Loveless (2024)

Curated by Beatrice Bonino and Sophia Crema
Via Carlo Michele Buscalioni 4, Turin
October 30-November 3, 2024

In 1980, young photographer Jeannette Montgomery Barron was invited by her brother Monty to serve as stills photographer on the set of "The Loveless," co-directed by Kathryn Bigelow and starring Willem Dafoe, Marianne Kanter, Robert Gordon, and Tina L.

While the crew stayed in an eerie Holiday Inn lost somewhere in Atlanta, the film was crafted with limited resources and a sense of artisanal authenticity. Notably, most of the actors were street cast and had never appeared in a film before.

Commissioned to capture wardrobe tests, Jeannette instinctively crafted portraits that blurred the lines between reality and performance, vulnerability and fiction. The scenes dance between almost stolen portraits, clothing adjustments, and shiny leather jackets, hinting directly at the raw, immediate process of filmmaking. Particularly striking are the three images portraying a still man on the bed. Is he drunk? Or is he dead? Is he performing or merely resting? While these shots evoke a sense of harshness, the presence of human elements around the motionless man breaks through the fiction, imbuing the series with a soft ambiguity.

These early images of Jeannette, long tucked away in her Connecticut home, mark the beginnings of a profound portrait-making practice. This was a precursor to her later work in New York, where Swiss gallerist Bruno Bischofberger commissioned her to shoot the downtown scene of the 80s, capturing figures like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Mike Bidlo, Alex Katz, and Cindy Sherman. Her intense photographic portraits reveal the intersection between artists and icons.

Now resurfacing, these never-before-seen photographs from the set of "The Loveless" illuminate the tipping point between the artist's shyness and the creation of iconic imagery behind her camera. They capture the genesis of a cultural moment that defined an era to come, revealing the shy artist's evolution into a confident portrait maker.

--Gilles Khoury