Billy Name, who has died aged 76, was a self-taught photographer who chronicled the early years of Andy Warhol’s New York City studio, the Factory. Warhol, who gave Name his first camera and encouraged him to shoot snatched portraits and fly-on-the-wall shots of such Factory luminaries as Edie Sedgwick, Viva, Nico and Candy Darling, later said: “Billy’s photos were the only thing that ever came close to capturing the feel of the 1960s … Factory.”
When I interviewed Name last year, he said: “I didn’t consider myself a photographer until much later when people started appreciating the work. I wasn’t influenced by any photographer and I hadn’t looked at any books or museum shows. I just took the camera when Andy handed it to me and said: ‘Here, Billy, you do the stills photography.’ I went to the store soon afterwards and got the manual for the camera.”
The two had first met in 1959 in Serendipity 3, a cafe in Manhattan staffed by gay men, where Billy Linich (as Name was then known) was working as a waiter. Trained as a set designer, Linich had begun hosting “hairdressing parties” in his loft, which he had decorated with silver foil instead of wallpaper. When Warhol turned up to one and saw the results, he asked Linich to do the same in his new art space on East 47th Street. Soon, they were lovers and Linich was overseeing the everyday running of the Factory. “I was the foreman and I made things operate. I took photographs and I kept my eye on Andy.” Linich happened on his Warholian pseudonym while filling out the first line of an official form and simply reversing the instruction “Name: Billy”.
When Warhol embraced film-making in 1963, it fell to Name to take over as in-house photographer, which he did with an instinctive flair for lighting and composition. As an insider at the Factory, he went about almost unnoticed with his camera, producing often intimate images that capture the bustle of creative activity, but also the peculiar ennui of the Factory. His portraits of the immaculately stylish, stick-thin socialite Sedgwick, the icily beautiful Nico and the young, black-leather-clad Lou Reed, as well as “superstars” such as Baby Jane Holzer, Viva, Darling and Ondine, have become iconic. He also photographed famous visitors, including Bob Dylan, who was sitting, bored and impenetrable, for a Warhol screen test. Printed in high contrast black and white – and silver – Name’s images evoke a time and place that have since become mythic in pop cultural terms.
Before he met Warhol, Name had embraced the New York avant garde scene of the early 1960s, having fled a middle-class upbringing in Poughkeepsie, upstate New York, for the bohemian environs of Greenwich Village. There, he met the composer La Monte Young, who employed him as “a human drone” for a performance which comprised “standing on stage holding a note with your voice for a very long time”. He also wrote concrete poetry and performed it as part of the Fluxus art group alongside John Cage and Yoko Ono. “It was a looser, freer time,” he told me. “You’d just run into people on the corner and go to their loft.”
Name’s life took a strange turn when Warhol moved to a bigger, much more commercially oriented space on Union Square in 1968. Having acquired an amphetamine habit, Name seldom emerged from his darkroom, eating and occasionally receiving select guests there. “I didn’t relate to the socio-structure of the Factory any more,” he said. In the words of the musician John Cale, Name became “the pimpernel of the silver ballroom – sleeping there as a wide-eyed guard, then much later disappearing into his room for months at a time only to emerge, to take pictures, then retreat back into silent oblivion”.
On 3 June 1968, he emerged from the darkroom after hearing what sounded like gunfire. He found Warhol lying in a pool of blood, having just been shot at close range by Valerie Solanas, an angry playwright who claimed Warhol had been stealing her ideas. “I went to him and took him up in my arms, and I started crying,” he recalled last year, still sounding emotional. Warhol survived, but two years later Name disappeared from his life, leaving a note on the darkroom door that read: “Dear Andy, I am not here anymore, but I am fine really. With love, Billy.”
He had, he said, become “saturated by the Factory”, and escaped first to New Orleans, then California, surviving by performing his poetry and living a determinedly frugal life as a Buddhist. He returned to Poughkeepsie a few years ago as his health began to deteriorate. “I’ve become more of a master of my own destiny. I’m content to let the whole culture go right past me,” he told me last year from his hospital bed.
A definitive book of his photographs, entitled Billy Name: The Silver Age, was published to considerable acclaim in 2014.
Despite the often dramatic arc of his life and his central part in the shaping of one of the great postwar pop cultural moments, he seemed remarkably humble and devoid of any regrets. “I think of myself and all individuals as seeds from a tree,” he said. “We are planted on the earth, go through the evolutionary stages of growing. So, it’s all within me – the Factory years and everything else. It’s in my nature. I am like a tree.”
• Billy Name (William Linich), photographer, born 22 February 1940; died 18 July 2016
