‘Saturday Night Live’ Photographer Edie Baskin Explains How She Ended Up on the Show After Meeting Lorne Michaels (Exclusive)

Photographer Edie Baskin, who helped develop some of Saturday Night Live’s most iconic imagery, is looking back on her 25 years with the show.

Baskin, 79, was behind the vivid, hand-colored portraits that greeted guests throughout the early seasons of the sketch comedy staple.

The famed photographer shares some of her rarely seen portraits of icons such as Steve Martin, Lily Tomlin, Ray Charles, Will Ferrell, Carly Simon, James Taylor, Shelley Duvall, Burt Reynolds, and Carrie Fisher, alongside countless other hosts, musical guests and members of the original SNL cast in her new book, Live From My Studio: The Art of Edie Baskin.

Baskin exclusively tells PEOPLE about how she got her start in the business before becoming Saturday Night Live’s resident photographer from the premiere in 1975 until 1999.

“I grew up in a family where people were artists. My father did sculpture. My mother was a painter, so it was always allowed. It wasn’t like you have to get a business degree or something like that,” she says. “It just was always a part of my life.”

“My father made a dark room for me when I was 13 years old, so I had that, and I worked for the school yearbook. I took pictures for that, all those kinds of normal things.”

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After growing up in Los Angeles, Baskin eventually moved to New York City, where she briefly pursued modeling before returning to photography.

“I started doing photographs again, but kind of a different kind of work,” she explains. “I started doing… I kind of think of portraits as: it can be a person or it can be a thing. I tend to gravitate towards them the same way. So if I took a picture of a tree or a picture of a person, I would treat it the same way.”

While living in N.Y.C., Baskin took a trip back to California and got invited to a poker night at Chateau Marmont. It was there that she first met Lorne Michaels. The two hit it off, and when they were back in New York, she invited Michaels over to check out some of her work.

“I met him with John Head and Gary Wise, who were doing talent and film at the time,” she recalls, noting that, at that time, she had been photographing in places like Las Vegas’ Neon Chapel and the Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, Texas.

“I was shooting only in black and white. At that time, there was only analog. So I had a very beginner camera, a Nikkormat. There was nothing electronic around — you had to focus every single picture by hand,” she says.

“I only had two lenses. I had a 50, which is a normal lens, and I had a 30, which was a portrait lens. And because I only had one camera, I’d have to change between them as I was shooting. So I had my photographs from Vegas and I hand-painted them.”

When Michaels saw the photos, “He was very favorable towards it. And I did ask him at that moment if there might be a job for me on his new show.”

A while later, she says she “got a phone call from him to come up to NBC.”

“Nothing existed because the show wasn’t formed, but he wanted them to see my photographs and see what they thought about lending themselves to possibly doing the same thing in New York,” she shares. “[They were looking for] nighttime scenes, hand-painted photographs, and they liked what I shared.”

Baskin took on the challenge and “went off into the streets, photographing at night.”

“I made a body of work of things that I thought would show New York as it was at the time,” she shares. “I gathered enough of them that they ended up putting them in… Well, it ended up becoming the title sequence.”

Saturday Night Live, originally dubbed NBC’s Saturday Night, premiered on Oct. 11, 1975. It didn’t take long for the show to find its footing and become a resounding success.

“In the beginning of Saturday Night Live, there were no cast photographs; there were only names. They were called the ‘Not Ready for Prime Time Players.’ There was only Jane, Lorne, Gilda, John Chevy, Garrett and Dan. We were just a bunch of kids.”

Baskin continues, “Then, everything changed. Lorne was really amazing because he gave me creative freedom, and that was such a blessing for me. When the show took off, it was quite something. The cast became recognizable. Everybody knew them in the streets and we were a group that became very insular.”

“We hung out together. We were just very close. Everyone who worked on the show together in the beginning,” she recalls.

Baskin would go on to be part of the SNL team for 25 years. While she’d gotten to know countless talented members of the cast and hosts passing through, the first cast left a lasting impression.

“The first cast will always be the first cast. We were kind of just in it together,” she shares.

“Then there was a second group of people that came in, and they were their own group. Some of the cast worked, some of the cast didn’t, but the ones that did always had that same kind of camaraderie,” she continues.

“Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz, that group was also very close. People were personal friends. Everybody knew each other. It was pretty much the same after that. I would imagine it was pretty much the same even now.”

During her time at SNL, Baskin says her responsibilities “evolved.”

“When I did the titles, I didn’t photograph the hosts or the musical guest. The first host musical guest I photographed was Paul Simon. That was his second show,” she shares.

“We were friends, so I took a picture of him and made a bumper of him,” she explains, referring to the moments that come between a commercial break and returning to the live show.

“During a commercial break, so instead of putting up one of the photographs that was in the title sequence, I put up a hand-painted picture of him. From then on, I thought that was a good idea. I decided to use the cast in titles also. There would be the pictures that I took originally, and every member of the cast and the musical guests.”

Getting to share her work in her new book is a trip down memory lane for Baskin, who fondly looks back at her time working on the show.

Among her favorite regulars were Lovitz and Carvey, she notes, “I hate to separate people, but they always make me laugh.”

As for her favorite host, she tells PEOPLE it is “definitely Steve Martin,” who “did a lot of shows in the beginning.”

Some of the best guests and most frequent visitors translated into some of Baskin’s other favorites from throughout the years.

“There was one person who did the show that I’d known growing up. As a matter of fact, I took dance classes from her. Her name is Terri Gar. And I took some photographs of her that I really loved,” she says, noting that John Malkovich and Alec Baldwin are also among her favorites.

“They were mostly people that I was closer with because in the end, they did this show so many times,” she adds.

While the actors were always down for anything, it was harder to get some of the musical guests on board.

“Some people didn’t want me to take their picture, so what I would do is get a publicity photograph, and I would treat it the same way as a photograph that I took,” she shares. “They were hard to work on because they were on glossy paper, and it was difficult to hand-tint them, because things didn’t take to them. I used a certain kind of paper, and it was very porous, just sucked the colors right in.”

Baskin is thrilled to have bits of her work travel to those who have come to love SNL throughout its many eras.

“I feel extremely fortunate to have had this opportunity,” she says. “I mean, I love being given a gift — 25 times a year, I got to do a show, and for 25 years. And I grew as a photographer because Lorne gave me creative freedom.”

Live From My Studio: The Art of Edie Baskin hits bookshelves Oct. 7.