The following is an interview by Marina Cashdan commissioned by Jacque magazine

Which premiers now in its first issue.

Portrait of an Artist

By Marina Cashdan

In the 1980s, before fine artists were media darlings and luxury brands were fighting to have the next ‘it’ art collaboration, photographer Peter Bellamy was weaving his way through the New York art scene, capturing photographs of working artists.

Bellamy, also called by his full name, Peter Sumner Walton Bellamy, captured both the big names, like Andy Warhol, Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman, Keith Haring, and Jeff Koons, and those who fell off the map in the wake of the AIDS epidemic, drugs, alcoholism and gentrification.

The project became his book The Artist Project: Portraits of the Real Art World / New York Artists 1981-1990, sated with portraits that capture the spirit of the artist; sans celebrity, sans auction price points.

The honest, unfiltered images tell the story of a generation of artists and a spirit of thinking and living that many believe has gone adrift over the last decade; but one that Bellamy thinks we’re coming back to.

Jacque! sat down with Bellamy to talk about the making of The Artist Project:

MC: Your book, The Artist Project: Portraits of the Real Art World / New York Artists 1981-1990, includes portraits of many of the art world’s most prolific talents during the eighties and into today. That said, a lot has changed in New York’s art world since the 1980s - just look at the evolution of Soho. What was it like then? And how do your portraits reflect that change, either in your style, angle or approach?

PB: It was 1982 or 1983, so it was a different world then. As you know, this project started at the beginning of AIDS. Along with drugs and alcohol, it swept through the art world. Artists will do whatever it takes to survive, through this time they learned to deal with survival and mental health. This all comes through in these pictures. I tried to give you a direct emotional response to the subject. The thing that I aspire to, which I think is different, is that I don’t try to get in the way; I don’t present a filter. Usually, if I think someone’s work isn’t very good, it’s because they have a filter in front of their subject. My thing is that I relate directly to them, and was kind of naïve about that stuff when I started. I didn’t know anything about the art world.

MC: So how did you end up meeting all of these artists that you photographed?

PB: I networked.

MC: Whom did you start with?

PB: The Art Dealer Jack Tilton.

MC: And you met all of them through Tilton? Or did you meet people outside of that circle?

PB: Well I started with Jack. It was 1981. I lived in Brooklyn. I went to Pratt. I was shooting in the streets and I was trying to build a portfolio. I had this idea of shooting artists, so I went to the several galleries, but no one would give me the time of day. You know, that was the normal thing. Then someone talked about Jack Tilton. He was at Betty Parsons Gallery. I went to Jack and he was, like, a rolled up, eccentric, WASP type, who came from this big old famous WASPY family. He had that kind of unorthodox energy. He told me, ‘I’ll give you the artists from my Rolodex and each artist will give you five pictures, so you should do a book.’ And I knew right then that I had a book, because that’s all you needed. I wanted to do a portrait of a society and there it was. There’s something special about artists, something spiritual. It doesn’t matter whether the artist is known or unknown. Like, I was reading Beckett and his work wasn’t depressing. It had to do with love of humanity. If you allow yourself to believe there’s a God, there’s art. It’s hard for me not to love artists.

MC: For the most part you photographed these artists in their studios, which creates this sense of voyeurism in your photographs. Was it voyeuristic in a way?

PB: There is that aspect. I think there’s a lot of sexual energy in art, and a lot of sexual energy in portraiture. In a sense, you have the chance to be intensely intimate with people. So there’s that kind of feeling; and you have it for a second and that’s the portrait. How can you make that picture good? The only way is to get closer, is to try to feel what they’re feeling. I think for me, you become what you photograph. So by photographing artists, I became an artist.

MC: In what way did you get to know the subjects prior to photographing them? Did you meet them before photographing them? Or spend some time with them?

PB: Yes and no. Sometimes, like with Barbara Kruger, I only had ten minutes with them. It’s a very intense and intuitive thing. I would know their work; I would go to their shows. People would present this thing to the camera. Like with Alex Katz, I spent just a few minutes in there and that line of his posture is so him, and I spent just a few minutes in there. The same with Brice Marden: You’re going into his studio and you had the motif he was doing in the photograph. He was doing a commission for some church. I just went in there, I was in the zone and there was the thing of the light, and shadow. It was like synchronicity. It wouldn’t be possible to do this now. Then, artists weren’t so affected by the media.

MC: Can you tell me a bit about the technicalities? Obviously, you shot them all on film. What type of camera did you use? Was there a reason that you photographed all the subjects in their own spaces?

PB: The pictures for the book were taken with a really raw camera. It was really a box, a bellows and a ground glass. It was totally primitive. Other photos were taken with a Rolleiflex. I used a very basic, rugged camera. I develop my own film. With the artists, I shot black and white because that’s very classical. As for the locations; I had no place else to shoot… I would just walk in to the artists’ studios and knew who they were. I knew all their friends. There was this kind of knowledge that was going around. Back then, it was just that you photograph one person and that person has the same records as their friends and lovers, so you made connections within the art world. 

MC: Are there particular questions, or any approach that you’d take to bring out the personality of each subject?

PB: You’ll have a really intimate conversation really quickly. In some cases, you’ll reveal things about yourself; while other times you talk at the people and you’ll manipulate them through conversation. There’s a certain period of time in which you can do it. There’s a kind of flow in the body, a relationship to the spinal column. It’s both literal and abstract. You’re trying to get an energy in a portrait. You know, like Bill Jensen would say; there’s no such thing as an inanimate object.

MC: In your opinion, how does that translate into a photograph?

PB: I think that artists feel things for us. The portraits tap into this. You’re able to build things into their character, you know, like the energy of Louise Bourgeois or the isolation of Barbara Kruger. It’s not that they wanted to be artists. They had to be artists. I think that when artists are photographed like celebrities, the pictures are empty; they’re so void. In my photograph of Artschwager - what a mind! It was an extremely difficult time for him personally, when I took the photograph. You know, with Cindy Sherman and then Eric Fischl at Rockaway Beach, there are things that are just intuitive. Like with Andy Warhol; I just shot a couple of frames.

MC: How did you get a photograph of Warhol?

PB: It was a photo shoot for Elliott Erwitt - and Warhol was waiting for Grace Jones and she was late. I had a Rolleiflex with me and I just held it out and for one brief second, I got it; and was able to create it again in the dark room. I have a relationship with the dark room… Photography has become dead, I’d say. I think digital photography is good mostly for porn. These film photographs are silver. There’s an alchemy that takes place in the dark room.

MC: Was it difficult at the time to be a photographer? Like any artist, did you feel like you were always facing adversity, whether it was poverty, or originality, or integrity? In hind sight, where did this project fit into that psyche, if it existed?

PB: An artist smiles in the face of adversity, one must be relentless. The thing that I was trying to do was achieve excellence in portraiture. The Artist Project was a vehicle to do that. It was something that I was really interested in, that I had the desire to keep coming back to, to keep at it. I ended up sleeping in my dark room many nights. Doing my art is more important to me than anything. There’s a kind of high that you get, that excitement, where you say ‘wow’. It never leaves you. It’s hard in New York, because it’s so challenging. Many artists live below poverty level. I don’t know how it gets done. You keep making things in defiance. I think it’s changing again in a different way. Like now, we’re getting back to it - and very fast -because of the financial crisis. I’m having to drive a cab now, again. I’m going back to, you know, those people who drove cabs, like Phillip Glass… Just to keep the banks at bay.

MC: Did you stay in touch with any of the artists after you photographed them? Did you develop any long-standing friendships or working relationships with any of them?

PB: Some of them I did. You sort of had an awareness of them. After the book, when I continued to photograph, it was commissions and I would do anything I could do to take photographs. With Louse Bourgeois, there was the kind of madness. She would demand negatives. She wanted to cut up negatives. I would do things that other people would not do in that way with her, to capture her image… But she was sweet. There was kind of a connection. If I would say there were people I learned a lot from, I would say one would be Orson Welles, and another Louise Bourgeois. My first job out of school was working for Orson Welles. I photographed his mistress’s sculpture.

MC: What did you learn from Welles?

PB: Lighting and the seriousness of art.

MC: How long did you work for him?

PB: Several Weeks. What I realized with him is that he really is Citizen Kane. It wasn’t really based on Randolph Hearst - and everything you need to know about photography is in Citizen Kane.

MC: What was the time frame for the Project? How did it evolve into book form?

PB: It was photographed from ’81 to ’91 and then it took a while to move forward. I ended up publishing the book myself. It was a magic time. You had to have a ‘borrow, beg or embezzle money’ kind of mentality. I would pretty much do whatever I could do to get it published; and I did.

MC: How do you hope that your photographs in The Artist Project portray the art community at that time? Or the life of an artist in any era; past, present, or future?

PB: I think what you do with art is create something - and then it has a life of its own. It exists and it seems to get more and more appreciated because it’s real. The Artist Project has stood the test of time. The work has become classic. There’s just this incredible passion in this work. The artists gave me this gift to create and to understand what it meant to be an artist. I didn’t sell out. I didn’t betray my principles. These silver images keep getting better and better. Then, I walked away from it and The Artist Project was a gift back; just like any artist creates this thing. This project, in a sense, serves as a reference point for what an artist is: That kind of passion and what portraiture is. The one thing that is unmistakable in these pictures is not that they’re celebrities, but that they’re artists in their environments, in their lairs and in their spirits. They live, they breathe, they piss, they even shit art. When they wake up, they have only art on the mind, and the same when they go to sleep. They never let go of that; and that kind of passion is a life force. It’s more important now than ever before - particularly as we come out of this horrendous dark period, when people realize that this recession is the punishment we have to face for our greed. What artists have, and what they express, is this life force, this gift. You can’t train your dog to make art. Art is unique to that extent. It’s the lover that never betrays you. It’s immortal.

Photographs courtesy of Henry Gregg Gallery