An emblematic figure of Andy Warhol’s Factory, Gerard Malanga was one of the privileged witnesses of New York’s art scene in the 1960s and 1970s, photographing its faces, encounters, and moments of everyday life. A photographer, poet, and filmmaker, he was both an active participant in this scene and a keen observer of it. Through a selection of photographs, Galerie du Jour agnès b. revisits a time when artists, musicians, writers, filmmakers, dancers, and poets came together in an atmosphere of creative excitement and freedom that continues to fascinate us today.

This exhibition also tells the story of a longstanding friendship and loyalty between Gerard Malanga and agnès b. In 2004, several of the artist’s prints were already shown at Galerie du Jour as part of the group exhibition Bande à Part, devoted to the constellation of artists and personalities who shaped New York’s underground scene. More than twenty years later, his gaze returns to the gallery, as a living memory of that era, still as free and intimate as ever.

Born in the Bronx in 1943, Gerard Malanga met Andy Warhol in 1963, at the age of twenty, through the poet Charles Henri Ford. He then joined the Factory and quickly became one of the central figures in this extraordinary artistic adventure. His practice spans music, poetry, film, performance, and photography, dissolving the boundaries between disciplines.

Throughout his encounters, Malanga photographed those who came to embody this era: Andy Warhol, William S. Burroughs, Mick Jagger, Iggy Pop, Dennis Hopper, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, Candy Darling, and many others. His photographs do not seek to create icons. On the contrary, they seem to bring these figures closer to us, capturing artists in moments of presence, complicity, solitude, or abandon. Perhaps this is where the particular strength of his work lies. Behind the figures who have since become mythical, Malanga reveals people, friends, companions, individuals encountered at a party, a concert, in an apartment, or at a café. His camera becomes a way of preserving a record of these relationships and of this fleeting community.

“I photographed them because they were my friends, because I loved them, because they were there.”

This sense of affection runs deeply through his work. It makes Malanga’s photography not only an exceptional archive of an era, but also the story of an artistic community, a generation, and the friendships that shaped it. And while this New York scene now belongs to history, it has lost none of its power to electrify us. In Malanga’s gaze, it remains alive and profoundly human.

In partnership with the Bel Oeil Collection, Nice, France.