Billy Name, who has died at the age of 76, was a lover and confidant of the pop artist Andy Warhol and, as a vital member of his New York "Factory", was responsible for many of the most famous photographs of the Warhol entourage, capturing such "superstars" as the Velvet Underground vocalist Nico, Baby Jane Holzer, Viva Candy Darling and UltraViolet.

Name's real name was William Linich and he met Warhol in 1959 while moonlighting as a waiter at Serendipity 3, a Manhattan restaurant famous for its desserts and gay-only employment policy. A few years later, Ray Johnson, a figure in the early Pop Art scene, brought Warhol to Linich's apartment for a haircut.Since Linich could not afford wallpaper, he had covered the walls of the apartment in tin foil: "Andy saw how spectacularly brilliant the place looked and he said: 'Oh Billy, I just got a new loft space. Would you do this to my new loft?'"Warhol ("the second greatest colourist of the 20th century, after Matisse") had bought a former hat factory on East 47th Street and Linich duly covered its walls in silver paint and foil. Before long, he recalled: "I was sort of like Andy's boyfriend."Over the next seven years he became Warhol's principal factotum, handyman, secretary, archivist, studio manager and bouncer."The Factory had this thing of being a living place," he recalled. "I would always be there as foreman, making sure that it remained the art piece which made everyone want to be there. I could handle these temperamental and vicious people because I was one of them, but quiet."He adopted his pseudonym in 1964 while poring over a form: "It said name, line, address, line. I wrote in Billy, and I said: 'Wait a minute - Billy Name.' It just had the right sound to it." It sounded more like a "Warhol Factory character".When Warhol got his 16mm silent camera, he gave his 35mm single-lens reflex Honeywell Pentax to Name and said: "Billy, you do stills, I'm gonna do films." Name was soon providing the cover shots for Velvet Underground albums and recording the creativity and excesses of the demi-mondaines - models, musicians and "superstars" - who passed through The Factory, compiling a portfolio of mostly black-and-white images that featured in numerous magazines and newspapers of the '60s.Warhol once said that Name's photographs were "the only thing that ever came close" to capturing the essence and spirit of The Factory."We were the forward edge of the New York art scene and so we had a lot of licence," Name recalled. "There were no traditional standards because we weren't Europe any more. There were no museum people or art critics trying to forge the way art should be. It was up to the artist."The Factory relocated to Union Square in early 1968, whereupon Name, by then almost permanently high on amphetamines, took up residence there in his darkroom.The musician John Cale described him as "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".Then he suddenly disappeared, as Victor Bockris related in The Life and Death of Andy Warhol: "By November [1969] Billy had been living in his darkroom for nearly a year. He had become more legendary than real. One morning Warhol found Billy's door open and a note tacked on it reading: 'Andy - I am not here any more but I am fine. Love, Billy.'"The turning point, it seems, had been June 3 1968, when Name emerged from his darkroom to find Warhol lying in a pool of blood, having been shot several times by Valerie Solanas, an avant-garde feminist playwright who was convinced he had been stealing her ideas."I took him in my arms and I started crying," he recalled, to which Warhol responded: "Oh Billy, don't make me laugh, it hurts too much."Warhol survived, but nothing would ever be the same."After Andy got shot, Paul Morrissey [the new director of Warhol's films] was gradually taking over, and it wasn't my scene," Name said. "It was like the cardboard Andy after that. He said many times that he thought he had died in the shooting, and was just living in a dream state."Though Warhol would live for another 17 years, Name's departure really marked the end of the end of the '60s Factory.Name was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, on February 22 1940 to German and Italian immigrant parents. He fled "the mediocrity of middle-class life in Poughkeepsie" in his late teens and, after travelling to the West Coast, settled in New York, where he immersed himself in Taoism and Buddhism.Described as "startlingly handsome" by Robert Heide in his memoir of the period, Linich was taken up by the director Nick Cernovich and became part of the avant-garde theatre scene, working as a stage lighting designer and sometime performer.He wrote and performed "concrete poetry" and crossed paths with Yoko Ono. "My friend said: 'That's Yoko Ono.' And I said: 'Oh.' I walked up to her. She had some blue flowers in her hand and she said: 'Look at my pretty blue flowers.' That was about it for Yoko."After leaving The Factory, Name went south to New Orleans then west to California, performing poetry and developing new interests in metaphysics and the occult. In the late '70s, he returned to Poughkeepsie, where he became involved in local community activism.After Warhol's death in 1987, Name's negatives from The Factory years were found in the artist's effects and returned to their creator.In recent years, there has been a renewal of interest in Name's work, with shows of his photographs at galleries around the world. His first exhibition in Europe was held at the ICA in 1997. Another exhibition, Billy Name - The Silver Age, was held last year at the Serena Morton gallery in Ladbroke Grove.1940-2016..