Few artists have cemented themselves in the pop culture canon to the extent that Andy Warhol managed to — appropriately, given his obsession with fame and mass media, and the role he played in redefining art as an everyday commodity.
For all that fame, however, few would think of Warhol as a photographer — despite the fact that almost his entire output related in one way or another to that medium.
A new exhibition opening in Adelaide this weekend shows the iconic artist through a different lens.
Andy Warhol and Photography: A Social Media, exclusive to the Art Gallery of South Australia, positions him as a photomedia pioneer, obsessive documenter of his day-to-day life, and consummate cultivator of his own 'brand' who influenced the social media culture of today.
It also reveals a rawer, less polished side of the notoriously inscrutable artist.
Featuring more than 250 works drawn from almost 30 different lenders, the exhibition ranges from the bright silk-screen serial portraits for which Warhol is best known (including a set of 10 Marilyn Monroes) to his famous 'screen tests' (featuring Lou Reed and Salvador Dali, among others), one-off polaroids and photo booth portraits, and lush gelatin silver photographs he took of friends, collaborators and the New York scene.
All up, it presents "a whole new self-portrait of Andy", says curator Julie Robinson.
Robinson, AGSA's senior curator of prints, drawings and photographs, has been working towards the exhibition since 2015, when she fielded the idea with the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh after seeing the National Gallery of Victoria's Warhol/Ai Weiwei exhibition, which contained a tranche of his polaroids.
But the very first seed of the idea was sown in 2012, when AGSA bought three polaroids by Warhol, including a portrait of Liza Minnelli.
"I started thinking about, 'Where does his photography fit into the history of photography?'" Robinson says.
In the following years, she led AGSA's acquisition of a further 42 photographic works by Warhol.
Factory photographers
Crucially, the exhibition puts Warhol's work in the context of a thriving scene of photographers he counted as influences and collaborators, particularly during the heyday of the Silver Factory (as his studio from 1964-68 was called).
Forget the solitary 'hero artist': Warhol's work is here juxtaposed with that of lesser-known artists, photojournalists and "Factory photographers" (as Robinson nicknames his loose crew of studio associates) in a way that reveals the cross-pollination of ideas and styles.
Highlights include beautiful black-and-white documentary photography by Duane Michals, British fashion photographer David McCabe (who Warhol hired to document him for a year), Steve Schapiro, Nat Finkelstein and Gerard Malanga (Warhol's studio assistant), and portraits by his friend and collaborator Christopher Makos.
Brigid Berlin, to whom Warhol's polaroid oeuvre owes a creative debt, gets her due: a display of her own photographs.
Summarising the scene, Silver Factory resident photographer Billy Name wrote in 1997: "Cameras were as natural to us as mirrors … It was almost as if the Factory became a big box camera — you'd walk into it, expose yourself and develop yourself."
Not art, but 'snapshot'
In terms of photographic talent, Warhol's circle rather outstripped him.
While he was both enthusiastic and prolific (around 60,000 photographs were discovered after his death), Warhol was uninterested in the technical side of photography.
He bought a 35mm SLR camera in 1964, but quickly judged it to be too complicated for him, and bestowed it on Name (whose beautiful photographs are seen in the exhibition).
Most of Warhol's photographs were taken with various polaroid and inexpensive point-and-shoot cameras.
Catherine Zuromskis, associate professor of photography and art history at Rochester Institute of Technology, makes a blunt assessment in an essay commissioned by AGSA for the show:
"[Warhol's] photographs are consistently bad – for want of a better word. They are blurry, erratically lit, chaotically composed, and poorly timed. Warhol favoured an approach – one hesitates to call it an aesthetic – that seems utterly artless, banal, even boring."
Far from dismissing Warhol's photography, Zuromskis reframes it as not art, but "snapshot": Warhol is "less concerned with the aesthetic or formal innovation and more with capturing a moment or an individual on film".
Warhol himself said: "I think anybody can take a good picture. My idea of a good picture is one that's in focus and of a famous person doing something unfamous."
There are plenty of those to be found in the AGSA exhibition: a buff, shirtless young Arnold Schwarzenegger taking a personal call; Liza Minnelli goofing on a bed at Halston's house; Lou Reed eating lunch.
There are also plenty of Warhol doing "unfamous" things — and it's with those images, where he's less Warhol and more Andy, that the exhibition pinions the viewer: Rather than the silver-wigged svengali 'avatar' of pop culture, we get a glimpse of the human.
Warhol was famously inscrutable; His gnomic pronouncements and deflective responses to media questions, his Sphinx-like expression, were all part of a calculated strategy to reveal very little of himself.
In the AGSA exhibition, we see him smiling, goofing, candid: as a shy-looking teen, photographed by his brother John; with his mother at the hairdresser; cuddling his dachshund Archie; sharing intimate, playful moments with various boyfriends; fanboying in polaroid selfies with Alfred Hitchcock, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and Stevie Wonder.
Social media as personal diary
As much as Warhol's photography was deployed to cultivate his image and the mythology of the Factory scene, it was also a form of diary (a dynamic familiar to anyone with an Instagram or TikTok account).
As he said: "A picture means I know where I was every minute. That's why I take pictures. It's a visual diary."
Walking through the AGSA exhibition, viewers may find themselves wondering about Andrew Warhola, the boy who grew up painfully self-conscious in a conservative, working-class suburb of Pittsburgh during the Depression, the son of Czech immigrants who were strictly Catholic; and the starry-eyed 20-year-old graduate of Carnegie Tech who landed in New York in 1949 on the cusp of its Mad Men-era boom, and found his metier in commercial illustration.
Over the next decade, Warhol would drop the 'a' at the end of his surname, and assiduously apply himself to penetrating the art establishment.
Looking at photographs taken by Warhol and others, of himself, and his surroundings, you might wonder what it is about a person's experience that drives them to document their life almost moment by moment, as he went on to do via film, photography, daily diaries and audio recordings.
The resonance with social media and influencer culture is clear — but even by today's standards, Warhol's solipsism feels extreme.
Queer New York
For those less interested in Warhol's personal mythology, there is another — less touted — line of interest in the show: its portrait of the queer demimonde of New York (a theme explored in depth by the 2022 Netflix docuseries The Andy Warhol Diaries, executive produced by screen titan Ryan Murphy).
There's the queer intimacy in countless candid photos, the queer desire in polaroids of an underdressed Mick Jagger and anonymous bare buttocks taken by Warhol; there are portraits of transgender actors Candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn (the latter of which inspired Lou Reed hit Walk on the Wild Side), self-portraits by Robert Mapplethorpe, and a polaroid of a cheeky-looking John Waters with Divine.
In a surprisingly tender moment, in the show's final stretch, Christopher Makos's 1981 portrait series Altered Image: Five Photographs of Andy Warhol shows the artist role-playing an idealised self, with perfect make-up and a platinum-blonde wig.
Makos, who contributed his own materials and insights to the exhibition and travelled to Adelaide for the opening, recalls: "Andy said, 'I want to be pretty, just like everybody else.'"
One of the show's major revelations is the display of works from Warhol's 1975 screen-print series Ladies and Gentlemen: 10 portraits of previously unidentified models who Warhol's associates reportedly recruited from The Gilded Grape, a hangout for Black and Latinx trans women and drag queens.
In 2014, the Andy Warhol Foundation conducted intensive research to identify the sitters, who included gay liberation activist Marsha P. Johnson — a key figure in the Stonewall uprising of 1969.
On display, the screen prints are joyous and cheeky — and the sitters are named. As the exhibition opens, on the closing weekend of WorldPride, this moment of recognition and reclamation has added resonance.
Andy Warhol and Photography: A Social Media runs March 3-May 14 at the Art Gallery of South Australia.
