My Mother's Clothes:
An Album of Memories
Written and photographed by Jeannette Montgomery Barron
Introduction by Patrick Kinmonth
Preface by James D. Barron
112 pages, 6 1/2" x 8"
100 color photographs
Hardcover, $24.95 ($29.95 CAN)
ISBN 978-1-59962-077-0
On Sale: March 2010
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Beautiful and eccentric, headstrong and mannered, Eleanor Montgomery Atuk was a genteel force in Atlanta society. Born in a Georgia town too small for a stoplight, she fell in love with her college sweetheart—heir to the Coca Cola Bottling Company, got married, and followed her husband to Atlanta in the 1940s, where he would rise to become the chairman of the company. In addition to being an adoring wife and mother, Eleanor loved exquisite clothes, especially those by designers Bill Blass, Yves St. Laurent, and Norman Norell, some of whom she called her friends. As the wife of an important business man, and a woman actively involved in community service, she felt she had to dress the part; her clothes were special ordered from the infamous Rich's department store in downtown Atlanta, and she regularly visited the showrooms in New York for custom fitted couture. She was the sort of woman who, when she liked a shoe, bought it in several colors each season.

Eleanor was always brimming with projects, ideas that burned at her day and night. "She was not a socialite," says the author, "that's the wrong word. She was a woman who used her influence to get things done." Her daughter remembers noticing the first sign of her mother's memory loss nearly ten years before her death, when Eleanor gave her the same book on tulips, over and over again. Yet even as her mother's affliction with Alzeheimer's grew dire, her love of fashion remained her foremost pleasure. Just a month before she died, Montgomery Barron brought her mother a catalogue from the designer Valentino's exhibition in Rome. Writes the author:

She was instantly transported into another world. We sat for hours looking. She pointed at one dress and said, Oh, I'm going to take that one if you don't want it, and, I haven't taken one in such a long time. When I tried to turn the page, she said, Hold on, now, scanning over the whole page with her index finger to make sure she had seen it all. At one point, she said, I wanna die in that.

By the time she passed away in 2007, Eleanor's spacious closets could barely contain the exquisite gowns, suits, skirts, and blouses she had worn and collected over a lifetime. This was her backstage dressing room, where most mornings began in quiet contemplation; choosing, selecting, considering... What to wear? For Jeannette Montgomery Barron, nearly every item in her mother's carefully curated collection is attached to a day, a season, a voice, a laugh, a moment, a memory. Here in these pages, she takes them off the racks and out of the drawers to preserve her mother's legacy, in a final, joyful performance. One that reminds us all, of how defined we are by the precious things we carry.

JEANNETTE MONTGOMERY BARRON studied at the International Center of Photography, and became known for her portraits of the New York art world in the 1980s, which were later published in her monograph, Jeannette Montgomery Barron. This was followed by Photographs and Poems in 1998, with text by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jorie Graham (Scalo), Mirrors, a collaboration with renowned author Edmund White (Holzwarth Editions, 2004), and Session with Keith Haring in 2006 (Holzwarth). Her work has appeared in publications around the world, including Vogue, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair, and her prints are held in numerous museum collections, such as The Houston Museum of Fine Arts, The High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and The Andy Warhol Museum. Jeannette Montgomery Barron lives and works in Rome, Italy and Connecticut with her husband and their two children.

PATRICK KINMONTH is a diverse artist and writer. He has been Arts Editor at British Vogue and written texts for many photography and art books, notably collaborating with Mario Testino, Snowdon, and Tessa Traeger. He has worked as a painter, a curator and exhibition designer, set and costume designer, opera director and architect all over the world. His most recent design project, a new building for Missoni, has just been unveiled on LA's Rodeo Drive.

JAMES D. BARRON is an art dealer and author living in Italy with his wife Jeannette Montgomery Barron and their two children. Before becoming a private art dealer, he worked in New York at the Knoedler Gallery and the Jan Krugier Gallery. His article, "Picasso's Women," was published in The Paris Review in 1987 and in 1998 he had his first New York Times bestseller: She's Having a Baby - And I'm Having a Breakdown (William Morrow, l998); this was followed by She's Had a Baby - And I'm Having a Meltdown (William Morrow, l999), and She Wants a Ring - And I Don't Wanna Change a Thing (William Morrow, 2001). His books have been translated into more than ten languages including German, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese and Hebrew.

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