Andy Warhol and Photography: A Social Media

Andy Warhol (1928-1987) was an American artist most commonly associated with the Pop Art movement which emerged in the 1950s in Britain and America. Pop artists borrowed imagery from the everyday and popular culture including movies, advertising, product packaging, music and comic books. Warhol made the everyday iconic, using commercial products as subjects in his works such as Brillo washing powder, Coca-cola, and the Campbell’s soup can.

From the beginning of Warhol’s career, photographs became an important source material and were used by the artist as the basis of his paintings and screenprints. Warhol used his own photographs and photographs taken by his friends but he also used images he found in magazines, advertisements and publicity material. His well-known painting of Elvis Presley, for example, is based on a publicity still from the movie Flaming Star (1960).

Instant Moments

In the late 1960s Warhol’s closest friend and a fellow artist, Brigid Berlin, bought a Polaroid camera and began to obsessively photograph her life and surroundings. Inspired by her example and attracted to the immediacy of the medium, Warhol himself bought a Polaroid camera and used it until 1976 to compulsively document his life and social scene. He then purchased a new camera, a Minox 35 EL, the smallest type of 35 mm camera at that time. This facilitated a new direction – black-and- white photography – which lasted until his death in 1987, and resulted in many thousands of 8 x 10 inch gelatin-silver photographs, each of which exists as a work of art in its own right.

Stillies

In addition to creating his Pop Art paintings, Warhol was a leading underground filmmaker, making hundreds of experimental films. Some were silent, some were loosely scripted and others were largely improvised; most invariably relied upon friends and acquaintances as ‘actors’, such as in his 1965 film Camp. The exhibition Andy Warhol and Photography: A Social Media includes various screentests or ‘stillies’ – three-minute silent portraits of sitters who were instructed to sit motionless and gaze directly at the camera.

Candid Camera

Commissioned portraits became a significant part of Warhol’s artistic practice. He based these portraits on Polaroid snapshots taken by him during photo shoots in his studio. The instantaneous nature of Polaroid photography allowed Warhol and the sitter to immediately select an image to be transformed into a painting. Warhol’s studio photo shoots were often a social and collaborative affair, with studio assistants and others photographing alongside Warhol, while studio guests watched on.

Warhol took his camera everywhere; it was a constant presence in private and social situations, where he captured his friends and celebrities in candid moments with a ‘snapshot’ aesthetic. Warhol’s gelatin-silver photographs were first seen publicly when he published his photographic book, Andy Warhol’s Exposures, in 1979. At that time, he described his philosophy on photography:

[1] Andy Warhol, with Bob Colacello, ‘Introduction: social disease’, in Andy Warhol’s Exposures, Hutchison, London, 1979, p. 19.

Contemporary Contact Sheets

In film (or wet) photography, contact sheets are made by placing the negative strips directly onto photographic paper to make one print. This way, the photographer can see all the frames from one roll of film at once. Today, in most smart phones, when scrolling through our images, we see lots of images at once – this could be considered a contemporary version of a contact sheet. Warhol’s contact sheets reveal his daily journeys, the people he meets, and his wry observations of details from everyday life, including shop windows, signage and roadside rubbish. Warhol’s eye was also drawn to serial imagery and abstract patterns, including things such as a shadow on a sidewalk. The images he was collecting through photography were often later reworked for his proposed ‘stitched’ photographs.

Most of Warhol’s gelatin-silver photographs were printed by Christopher Makos, a photographer working for Warhol’s Interview magazine who later became a collaborator with Warhol. Makos said, ‘I undoubtably learnt a great deal from him, but he also learnt from me, especially about photography. We were ... continually exchanging impressions and ideas’. [3] They often photographed the same subjects side by side – whether travelling or in the studio – and Makos also took many photographs of Warhol. Makos’ portraits of Warhol depict him doing everyday or ‘unfamous things’, including rowing a boat on a lake in Paris, or posing wearing a clown nose.

[3] Christopher Makos, Andy Warhol, Charta, in collaboration with Edition Bruno Bischofberger, Zurich, 2002, p. 8.