The Interview

by Bryan-Ray Baker

In his first interview about his visual artistry, Montgomery Maxton, a luminary with a nearly three-decade journey, sat down with me, longtime fan and friend, Bryan-Ray Baker. Despite his established success, this marks the first time Montgomery Maxton has spoken exclusively about his photography and new media work.

In August 1996, a 16-year-old Montgomery Maxton, then known as Michael, accompanied his parents and younger sibling to the Ohio State Fair in Columbus, Ohio. The fair was a two-hour drive from their affluent rural estate in southwestern Ohio. Maxton recalls, “When we arrived, I can’t remember why, but my father gave me the family camera—a 35MM Minolta—and told us to go ride the rides and he told me specifically to take a lot of pictures.”

While waiting in line for the Ferris wheel, known as the Jolly Giant, Maxton was struck by the sight of the colorful ride against the blue sky. “So I snapped a photo very quickly and that was that,” he remembers. A week later, when the film was developed, his father was astonished by the photograph’s remarkable quality, as were others. “My father made enlarged copies at work and sold them to the coworkers that had expressed interest in buying a copy. My father gave me all of the money, which helped fund my teenage vices such as buying CDs and going to the movies with my friends. It was the second time I made money off my art, my first being when I was about eight years old, my grandmother, who was a ceramic artist, had me over in her studio to make and paint wind chimes, and I sold several of them to the people on her street.”

Maxton is entirely self-taught in the art form. In 1999, during an elective photography course in his senior year of high school, the educator remarked on the first day when Montgomery showed him his portfolio, “‘Why are you here? You have a great eye. This class is a waste of your time.’ So what I did was instead of developing my film at Walgreens like I was doing—which I spent my weekly allowance to do, which meant going without lunch at school—I just developed my film in the darkroom in the studio there.”

After graduating in 1999, he came out as gay and moved to Cincinnati. Around 2004, a year after changing his name to Montgomery Maxton—”Montgomery from Montgomery Clift the actor, Maxton from Anne Sexton, my favorite poet, with a twist”—he transitioned from film to digital photography and moved to Columbus, Ohio which had a vibrant arts scene.

In 2007, while on a trip to Montreal, he was in a cab en route to the airport to return to his home in Columbus, Ohio, when he spotted a skeleton in a window. He immediately shouted, “Stop the car! Stop, I have to get out for a second!” He ran across three lanes of traffic to capture the photograph. “I had taken a lot of photos on that trip, but I mean I needed to take this photograph, it was an overwhelming urge.”

The urge proved serendipitous. A month later, while watching The Bridges of Madison County for the first time, a film where Meryl Streep’s character and Clint Eastwood’s character who is a National Geographic photographer, strike up an affair, an idea struck him. “I was really high on Ativan at that point in my life because of various reasons, but I was like, I’m going to send my photograph to the editor of National Geographic.”

Despite the prescription-drug induced thought, he did so the next day. Shortly after, she responded with something akin to “Accepted for publication.” “Skeleton in a Gloomy Window” subsequently appeared on their website and garnered over a million views. Over the next five years, National Geographic would publish several more of his photographs, including his historic 2008 “Barack Obama in Ault Park.” A second photograph from that event, where he met then-Senator Obama just days before his election as President, was acquired by the Cincinnati Museum Center in 2024 for their permanent collection.

When asked when he started street photography, the question seemed to puzzle Maxton. “I’m not quite sure. I don’t think there was ever a day when I said, ‘Okay, today I’m going to do street photography.’” When probed further, he recalled the roots of it while living in Cincinnati in 2004, running around with his boyfriend at the time, snapping photographs of the rapidly changing city. “But, I snapped my first New York City street photograph in 2007, and of course it was people on the subway, which I’ve somewhat become known for these days.”

The genre has endured, as Montgomery is indeed now recognized as a street photographer. However, he also works extensively in fine art photography and, over the last four years, in new media lens-based art. He is quickly becoming highly sought-after by galleries worldwide for his new media work, particularly his 2023 Orange series, which we will discuss later.

“I think being a street photographer is much harder than people think. You have to have all the exact right set of skills and talent—hand eye coordination is exceptionally important—and on top of that, you have to have guts, because it’s hard to stick a camera in someone’s direction and take a photo and be ready to defend yourself.

Luckily for Maxton, he has never encountered any hostilities, though he does recall one instance in Philadelphia where he was photographing paramedics reviving a man on the sidewalk, and one of the medics exclaimed, “Really, man! Come on!”

“The subway these days is very different from when I arrived 20 years ago. The pandemic changed this city, and it feels like the subway became more of a meth den and lunatic asylum. I literally see people shooting up and smoking crack. So while I’ve gotten good shots, it’s not exactly as safe as it has been. And it won’t be this way forever. One of the reasons I create street photography is because everything changes, and our present day will someday look so foreign and old to people probably not even born yet. But ultimately, I take the photos for myself. I have more photographs that have never been seen and probably won’t in my lifetime, not even with all the exhibits that are happening now.”

Although he has a strict policy of not letting his personal views interfere with photographing anything (for example, he has photographed MAGA supporters and individuals on both sides of the Israel/Palestine conflict), he has scaled back on photographing unhoused people as much as he used to. “Though I’ve gotten good shots over the years, I do stop to think about whether I would want someone taking my photograph at such a low point in life. And while others will obviously do it; other photographers will take their pictures, I do have to live with myself at the end of the day, so I don’t do it as much and if I do I try not to show their face.”

Maxton is quick to defend his right to photograph people in public, a right that has been debated at various points since the genre of street photography began. The US Supreme Court ruled that no one has an expectation of the right to privacy in public places, and Montgomery uses that as his foundation. “With my friends, I already know who does and doesn’t want to be photographed. Most of them are fine with it because they trust me, and I always give them a copy of the photo. With people on the ‘streets,’ I’ve never asked and never will because it’s about capturing those unposed, unsuspecting, unguarded moments.” He adds, “I like to remind people that when you’re in an Uber, you’re being recorded, and that driver can do anything with that video, so keep your mouth shut, don’t speak about private stuff, don’t have stupid behavior. On my block alone, I’ve counted 54 Ring cameras and surveillance cameras and 8 police cameras. Folks should be more concerned with that, not of some photographer making a unique portrait of them on the sidewalk or subway.”

Montgomery’s January 2024 photograph, “Winter,” has become one of his most popular and best-selling works. Capturing a woman walking up subway stairs in an eye-popping black and white coat, she appears to have almost stopped to pose for him, but she did not. “I was standing there waiting to take the 2 train to Crown Heights, and I saw her coming up the stairs in that remarkable coat! I had about five seconds to get ready, and this is one of those times where I think someone may have realized that I was taking their photo, but with that coat, I wouldn’t be surprised if she got her photo taken a lot. So I snapped three ‘live’ photos as she stepped up the last two steps. I did live photos because I knew someone would be like, ‘that’s posed,’ but you can see in the three live videos that she’s just walking up the steps.” The photograph appeared in its first gallery within four months. A limited edition, signed and numbered copy of the picture will set you back about $1,900.00.

If the grit of New York’s streets is Maxton’s bravado, you may be surprised to learn that the glamour of Hollywood and the power of politicians have also come calling. “The first person of notoriety that I photographed was Coretta Scott King, when I met her in 2004.” He has also photographed Anna Wintour for Interview Magazine. Icons such as Nicole Kidman, Sofia Vergara, and Julianne Moore have also entered into his archives over the years. He has expressed a desire to make a portrait of Oprah Winfrey. In 2016, in an Italian restaurant’s basement restroom in Lower Manhattan, he had just finished peeing when he moved to the sink to wash his hands, only to look up and see Mayor de Blasio washing his. “I asked if I could take a mirror photograph, and much to my surprise, he said yes. I can’t imagine being mayor of New York City; what a shitty job.”

Montgomery Maxton is shy but polite. He dislikes being the center of attention and will avoid it at all costs. He now has a small group of friends, a change from before when he had so many it was difficult to keep up. He possesses a social grace that is hard for him to break. His table manners are impeccable, and while he doesn’t always hug people (it depends on whether COVID or flu is circulating), he will shake someone’s hand, then immediately go wash it. “I wash my hands 15-30 times a day. I have a stomach flu phobia.” He has traveled to 15 countries since 2018, and even though he’s battling serious health issues—which he declined to detail for this interview, stating only that it’s an “ongoing struggle” and that the least of the issues is his partially permanently collapsed left lung, medically known as atelectasis, that occurred in late 2023—he plans to travel again when he figures out how to ‘live with’ the health issues. “Bodies really do change a lot in your early and mid-40s.”

Maxton, who turns 45 on June 29th—”they’re throwing me a big rainbow birthday parade in New York City that day!” he exclaims—says photography is a strange escape from reality. “While you’re photographing the world, you’re actually behind this armor of sorts that is the lens; you’re not really there,” which he says is how he’s able to capture these moments despite his long-documented anxiety issue. “I’m not really there at a protest rally; I’m looking at people through a lens, so it’s like watching a video or something. A lot of times it feels like I’m not really there, even if it’s just for a second or two.”

In more recent years, Montgomery has been experimenting with—and successfully creating—new media pieces. His 2023 series, Orange, utilizes nude male photography he has created over the last 20 years but never published. Using one or two software programs, he copies limbs, twists bodies, and overlays an orange filter… Montgomery corrects me and says he used two different shades of orange for the project; one on the subject and the other as the background. The pieces have gained international attention, with Montgomery working with several galleries around the world to tour the series.

In addition to Orange, he has created a series called Phantasm, using portraits of souls long gone, and a “Shadow” series which employs multiple colors and nude and sexually explicit photographs from his extensive archives. A political series, “Drag Me to Jail,” supports drag performers and the art of such, using photographs he’s taken over the years of drag queens. He hopes to debut Phantasm in New Orleans next year and has no plans as of yet for Shadow. A Brooklyn gallery has expressed interest in his ‘Drag’ series.

For 2026, a gallery in Cincinnati is considering a 30-year retrospective of his photography. “It would be a homecoming,” Maxton said, as he’s never exhibited in his hometown before. “It’s very hard to get an exhibit in Cincinnati, it’s very competitive because it has an amazing art scene but not enough venues. I was reading the news there recently, as I do daily, and there was a story about how a Cincinnati photographer got one of his photographs published by National Geographic… and I was like, ‘Well, do I have a story for you.’”

To see both published and unpublished photography from his portfolio—and selections from his series Orange, Phantasm, and Shadows—visit his Instagram on Sunday, June 15, 2025.