LIVE FROM MY STUDIO

A set of portraits from an artist who helped to define an era of celebrity.

Photographer Edie Baskin’s distinctive hand-tinted images helped to set the aesthetically adventurous tone of the cultural juggernaut Saturday Night Live from the program’s first episode in 1975. She would go on to photograph the show’s hosts and musical guests for the next 25 years (the images would typically appear as “bumpers” between ad breaks), and her instantly recognizable shots of Steve Martin (perhaps her signature muse) or Elliott Gould or Sissy Spacek deliver memory-evoking kicks. Baskin’s images for SNL may bring Andy Warhol’s celebrity Polaroid snapshots to mind, but their effects are markedly different. While Warhol’s often harsh, cold, and flat portraits distance the viewer from the subjects, Baskin’s vibrant enhancements (she used a variety of techniques to add pigment to her black-and-white shots) reveal quirky, human qualities—the viewer leans in, their relationship with the subject deepened. The brilliant and tragic Richard Pryor, for example, pictured wearing a psychedelic pink sweater, vibrates against a stark black background, his eyes full of the pain of the world. Some of Baskin’s pieces suggest well-known paintings: The photographer grants Shelley Duvall’s elongated features the languorous elegance of a Modigliani odalisque; a delicate image of Jodie Foster with straw-colored hair and sky-blue eyes seems plucked from an Andrew Wyeth canvas. At the other end of the spectrum, Rodney Dangerfield pulses with the inhuman energy and anarchic hilarity of a Warner Bros. cartoon. The cumulative effect of the collection is one of piercing nostalgia for a vanished era of show business that now seems impossibly human-scaled. Baskin’s subjects, as ecstatically celebrated here, were not like the machine-tooled, media-trained, TikTok-ready stars of the moment; they could be lumpy, awkward, weird, unpolished, real. The miracle of Baskin’s technique was that her alterations to the objective documentary “truth” of her photographs only made the work feel more authentic, more revealing of the subjects’ essential natures—a captivating magic trick that works again and again.

A sumptuous and revelatory collection of 20th-century iconography.