Beatrix Ost-Kuttner and Adelheid Ost, Virginia, 1987.
photo by Jeannette Montgomery Barron

Art photographer and author Jeannette Montgomery Barron, famous for her portraits of Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, William Burroughs, Keith Haring, our own Beatrix Ost-Kuttner, and others in the New York art world of the 1980s, will present passages from her memoir My Mother’s Clothes, an account of her mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s and Barron’s attempt to provoke memories by showing her mother, a fashonista in her day, portraits of her clothes. New Dominion Book Shop Wednesday, April 21 at 11am.

From Barron’s website:

“I originally thought of photographing my mother’s clothes as a project exclusively for her, to help spark her memories from the past; she had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. The project worked; my mother and I looked together at the photographs I had taken, and she would remember parts of her past. In fact, some of the titles of these photographs are direct quotes from my mother; “This is the Really Good One” and “We did a Lot of Dancing.”

My mother was a small town girl from Guyton, Georgia who fell in love with my father, married and moved with him to Atlanta in the 1940s. In addition to my father, she loved clothes, especially those of the designers Bill Blass, Yves St. Laurent, and Norman Norell. As a young girl, I remember driving to Rich’s department store in downtown Atlanta…(more)