Exhibition Review: Andy Warhol: Photo Factory
Dolly Parton (1985), unique Polaroid print. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
By Zoha Baquar
There’s a noise at Fotografiska New York’s new exhibition, Andy Warhol: Photo Factory. It’s a chatter––not from the fashionable exhibition visitors alone, but from the charisma and whispers of mid-century celebrity culture for which Warhol’s photographs are a microphone. It’s from the posed and playful portraits of Grace Jones, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Dolly Parton, Steven Spielberg, Jane Fonda, Marsha P. Johnson, Gianni Versace, Liberace, and several other of the pop icon’s sitters. Along with this noise, there’s a seduction––by the photographs from Warhol’s cheeky Nude Model series, certainly, but also by the museum’s own efforts to seduce you: it is intimately dim with walls that aren’t white but pink, red, black, dark, sexy. Ultimately, Andy Warhol: Photo Factory is moody: it’s moody ‘glamourati’ in moody New York, hosting the anticipatory feeling like you’ll meet Warhol just around the corner.
Keith Haring and Juan Dubose, 1983 unique Polaroid print © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Andy Warhol: Photo Factory, entitled in homage to Warhol’s New York studio, yields an impressively rare collection of 120 images, 20 of which have never been seen before. This collection attests the fundamentality of photography to Warhol’s work, gleaning into what the artist did beside and behind his colorfully mainstream silkscreen curtain of Marilyn Monroe and Campbell soup cans; in other words, what a Google search on the artist usually doesn’t show you. It surveys the developments in Warhol’s film-based photographic media throughout his career, beginning with his early photo-booth strips which later informed his iconic serialised images. It then moves onto Polaroids of the artist’s glamorous friends and creative peers in both voguish costume and the nude engaging in the exciting and the banal and created for the likes of Vogue Paris and Mondo Uomo, and finally evolves into his experimentation with stitched collages of gridded gelatin silver prints. Also on display are 4 of Warhol’s private 16mm screen tests, including Edie Sedgwick and Kipp Stagg (1965) and Lou Reed (1966).
Male Nude (Michael Walsh), c. 1987, six stitched gelatin silver prints © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Fotografiska reveals Warhol’s obsession with the camera––his voyeurism through it to see the world around him and those who both lived in it and made it lively. On Andy Warhol: Photo Factory, collector James R. Hedges, IV states: “This exhibition provides a scintillating introspective, especially as I consider these lesser-known stitched photos as an extension of Warhol’s raw self, one that the public has scarcely seen. Virtually every painting, print, and most works on paper began their life as a photo study. The fact is, Warhol used a camera as part of his daily social interactions over the course of four decades, it was integral to his interactions and his art-making process.”
This ticketed exhibition is curated by Grace Noh of Fotografiska New York in collaboration with Jessica Jarl of Fotografiska, Jack Shainman Gallery, and James R. Hedges, IV. It can be viewed at Fotografiska, located at 281 Park Ave S, New York, NY from September 10, 2021 to January 23, 2022.
Ladies and Gentlemen (Easha McCleary), 1974 unique Polaroid print © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
