I am a camera
A dazzling exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia explores the foundational role that photography played in Andy Warhol’s life and work.
Approaching the bright yellow entrance to Andy Warhol and Photography: A Social Media, one spies a quote on the wall: “My idea of a good picture is one that’s in focus, and of a famous person doing something unfamous. It’s about being in the right place at the wrong time.”
The sensitive, softly spoken boy from working-class Pittsburgh, who went on to effect a paradigm shift by shaping the raw materials of pop culture into high art, doesn’t disappoint. We get stars galore, from Debbie Harry to Mick Jagger, John Lennon to Liza Minnelli, David Hockney to Diana Ross. Look – there’s Bianca Jagger shaving her armpit; Truman Capote at his plastic surgeon’s; Yves Saint Laurent gossiping with Lauren Bacall; a lovestruck Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston; Dolly Parton and Keith Haring posing like teenage besties.
It takes considerably longer than 15 minutes to get through A Social Media, and that’s a good thing. By the end, we come to appreciate that the ringmaster of fame had a knack for being in the right place at the right time and for predicting the tenor of the times that lay ahead.
The fruit of 10 years’ research by senior curator Julie Robinson, with assistance from a small army of curatorial colleagues and research volunteers, this immersive, playful and well-paced exhibition reveals the extent to which Warhol’s prolific output was anchored in a career-long use of the photographic image.
In so doing, it constructs a kaleidoscopic portrait of a shrewd, analytical, industrious and collaborative artist – a social chameleon, in fact – who anticipated our age’s tech-fuelled anxieties around identity and self-image. Warhol used cameras in an obsessive, diaristic way, prefiguring their omnipresence in our day-to-day lives. Part of his brilliance lay in using the medium to expose the artifice of identity and self-image.
Designed to accommodate the display of works large and small, still and moving, the show comprises 285 photos – many of them unique – alongside paintings, screenprints and experimental films, as well as archival material, books and magazines. Also on display are examples of the types of cameras Warhol used between 1969, when he began colour Polaroid photography, and 1987, when he died unexpectedly from cardiac arrest following gall bladder surgery, aged 58.
Roughly chronological, the show has its first two spaces lined floor to ceiling with silver foil, recalling his Silver Factory studio of 196468. Warhol held his first solo show in New
York in 1952 while working as a commercial illustrator, but things really took off for him a decade later. At this point in his career Warhol was deeply involved in filmmaking, and 10 examples of his silent, moving-image “screen tests”, with subjects including Lou Reed, Bob Dylan and Edie Sedgwick, are on display, as is an excerpt from his feature-length film Camp (1965), inspired by Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay.
Most of the photos of Warhol and his retinue are by contemporaries and collaborators, including Bob Adelman,
Nat Finkelstein, David Mccabe, Duane Michals, Billy Name (responsible for the
Silver Factory’s foil-and-paint job) and Steve Schapiro. However, we do see Warhol’s first photobooth portraits from 1963, which went on to inform paintings of early collectors such as Ethel Scull and Holly Solomon.
Next we come face-to-face with Ladies and Gentlemen, an exuberant but little-known portfolio of 10 colour screenprints from 1975. Portraying members of New York’s Black and Latinx trans and drag community, the series includes noted activist Marsha P. Johnson, who participated in the 1969 Stonewall riots.
On an adjacent wall hangs Warhol’s iconic portrait series of Mick Jagger, who cosigned each of the 10 screenprints, also from 1975. Based on Polaroids, the images in both portfolios are overlaid with torn strips of colour, giving them a graphic, punk, downtown vibe.
Warhol’s Polaroid portraits from the early 1970s, some of which he exhibited as finished works, include self-portraits with Alfred Hitchcock and John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Taking his lead from long-time muse and confidante Brigid Berlin, who began using a Polaroid to document her life in
1968, Warhol exulted in the camera’s instantresults technology that, as a wall label tells us, “eliminated the threat of censorship at the photo lab”. Nearby are six Polaroids of men’s butts from his 1977 series Torso.
Having tried and failed to work an SLR camera in 1964, Warhol discovered the Minox 35 EL in 1976 and through it embraced 35mm black-and-white photography. While retaining the snapshot aesthetic of his earlier work, Warhol advanced technically and aesthetically thanks to lessons from photographer Christopher Makos, his friend and collaborator.
A highlight of the show are two complete portfolios of silver-gelatin photographs from 1980 – the only editioned photographs Warhol ever published – featuring candid portraits of friends and celebrities including Francis Bacon, Halston, David Hockney, Jackie Onassis, Paloma Picasso, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Elizabeth Taylor and Diana Vreeland. Further along, we learn about Warhol’s “studio portrait” practice of the 1970s and ’80s, whereby photos taken using a Polaroid Big Shot camera formed the basis for paintings and screenprints. Examples include Liza Minnelli and Debbie Harry. Here we see original Polaroids and finished works as well as photos taken by others on the day of the shoots, which occurred in 1978 and 1980 respectively.
Also on display are paintings of the only two Australians to sit for Warhol: the philanthropist and collector Loti Smorgon, in 1981; and the lawyer Henry Gillespie, in 1985. Warhol generally painted his portraits in pairs, as is the case with Smorgon, who commissioned him. These works were bequeathed to the National Gallery of Victoria – one of 30 national and international lenders to the exhibition – by the Smorgon family in 2014.
In the case of Gillespie, whom Warhol befriended in the early 1980s and appointed as the Australian editor of his magazine Interview, the artist asked him to sit and ended up producing four paintings. Gillespie received one as payment for his work and Warhol retained the rest. Gillespie’s painting entered the Art Gallery of South Australia’s (AGSA) collection in 1996 – the National Gallery of Australia had acquired the other three from Warhol’s estate in 1990.
The final spaces include examples of the artist’s stitched photos – a technique suggested to him by Makos, who’d pioneered it – and five photos from the famous wig-and-makeup portrait series from 1981, Altered Image, a collaboration between Warhol and Makos. As a coda, we get a late work – the NGV’S Self-portrait No. 9 from his 1986 camouflage series. Here a deadpan Warhol plays up to his gnomic persona and problem skin with a yellow, pink and blue camo design superimposed across his face.
Featuring all 49 Warhols in AGSA’S collection, of which 45 are photos, A Social Media makes a convincing case for Warhol as the first influencer, a compulsive photographer with a self-diagnosed “social disease” attuned to the power of the medium in shaping identity, manipulating self-image and facilitating fame. A couple of tips: bring four $2 coins for the old-school photobooth at the end and take plenty of snaps because, oddly, this Adelaide-only show has no catalogue.
Andy Warhol and Photography: A Social Media is showing at AGSA until May 14.