About

Edie Baskin is one of the defining visual chroniclers of contemporary culture—an artist and multiple Emmy–nominated photographer whose images helped shape the aesthetic language of modern television.

From the first broadcast of Saturday Night Live in 1975 through 2000, Baskin crafted the show’s visual identity, beginning with her hand-tinted photographs in its original title sequence. The imagery established an instantly recognizable graphic style and earned her an Emmy nomination in 1976. In 1983, she received a second nomination for pioneering a new form of photographic animation in the title sequence for Square Pegs. Over the course of twenty-five years at SNL, she photographed hosts and musical performers while serving as a production designer and art director—quietly influencing the visual tone of an era.

Working with an instinct for intimacy and edge, Baskin has created enduring portraits of cultural icons across film, music, and literature. Her photographs have appeared internationally in Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Vogue, The New York Times, and The New Yorker.

Her film and music collaborations include advertising campaigns for Streets of Fire and Look Who’s Talking Now, special photography for the Academy Award–winning film Days of Heaven, and album artwork including Paul Simon’s Still Crazy After All These Years, Cheryl Lynn’s In the Night, and alternate covers for Art Garfunkel’s Fate for Breakfast.

Baskin’s work has been exhibited nationwide, including presentations at the Museum of Modern Art, the Norton Museum of Art in Miami, the Palm Springs Art Museum, the Sun Valley Center for the Arts, and Ochi Gallery. 

Born to Burton Baskin and Shirley Robbins of the Baskin-Robbins family and raised in Southern California. Today, Edie Baskin’s work stands as an essential record of the personalities and moments that shaped late twentieth-century American culture—intimate, iconic, and unmistakably her own.