Portrait of a Lady
Fine arts photographer Jeannette Montgomery Barron creates an album honoring her mother’s fashion legacy
Eleanor “Ellie” Morgan Montgomery Atuk (left) was a genteel force in Atlanta society during the mid 20th century.
She married her college sweetheart, an heir to the Coca-Cola bottling fortune, and loved exquisite clothes, especially those by designers like Bill Blass, Yves Saint Laurent, and Norman Norell. She carefully curated her lifetime collections in spacious, organized closets.
In 2006 Ellie’s mind began to fade, and her daughter, Jeannette Montgomery Barron, started photographing her mother’s cherished pieces of clothing, shoes, and other personal possessions as a way to jumpstart Ellie’s memories — and stunt her own sense of loss. Even when she could no longer recall her daughter’s name, the photographs drew out reminiscences of where and when she’d worn her clothing and the paths she’d traveled in the favorite shoes and other items picked up at the shopping haunts she called “the Bs”: Bendel’s, Bergdorf’s, Bonwit’s, and Bloomingdale’s.
My childhood home was very formal, designed after a mansion in Vézelay, France. My mother had seen a picture of the house in a book and hired a local architect to replicate it. They were just putting on the finishing touches when I was born. Every year on my birthday my mother told me the same story. Grass seed had been planted the day she went to the hospital to deliver me; when she brought me home, the grass was starting to sprout.
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by
Sally Schultheiss
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