Big shot

Andy Warhol is rightly recognised as a pop art genius, but his work behind a lens is less well known. As the first Australian exhibition of his photographs opens, Peter Ross explores the role cameras played in his creative process

September 1980. New York. In a studio on Broadway, a photo shoot is taking place. ‘Oh,’ says the photographer, ‘your hair’s so beautiful. It’s really great.’ The photographer is Andy Warhol. His sitter is Farrah Fawcett. Warhol, in shirt and tie, stands three feet away from the actress, taking pictures with a weird-looking camera, the Polaroid Big Shot, and dropping the prints for an assistant to gather. Afterwards, he and Fawcett lean over a table to examine the images. ‘I mean,’ he says, ‘there’s no bad ones.’

Andy Warhol & Photography: A Social Media is the first Australian exhibition of his photographic work. ‘Photography was fundamental to everything he did in his art,’ says Julie Robinson, curator of the show at the Art Gallery Of South Australia. ‘These works provide a new perspective on Warhol, and the photographs themselves are interesting not only because of the people they depict but for what they tell us about the artist. The whole exhibition is a self-portrait, in a way.’

There are two strands to his photographic work: the candid black and whites of famous friends in 1970s New York (Bianca Jagger shaving her armpits, Jackie O hanging out in Liza Minnelli’s dressing room), and Polaroids taken as source material for larger portraits. The Farrah Fawcett session was arranged for that latter purpose. Likewise, a shoot with Debbie Harry. The Blondie singer writes in her memoir that she and Chris Stein would trawl New York junk shops for Polaroid Big Shots (production of the camera having ceased after two years) and buy them for Warhol ‘at around 25 cents a pop’. He was drawn to fast, cheap image-making. His nightclub photographs were inspired by the paparazzo Ron Galella, and many famous silkscreens were based on pictures found in magazines. For his first commissioned portrait, a 1963 silkscreen of Ethel Scull, he took the socialite collector to a photo booth and fed $100 into the slot until he had the shots he needed.

The exhibition’s subtitle, A Social Media, refers to the way in which Warhol’s work seems to foreshadow our Instagram age, being both aspirational and everyday. It also nods towards the collaborative aspects of his practice. He worked with a number of photographers, both professional and amateur, among them his close friend Brigid Berlin. She was an early adopter of Polaroid, and it was through her that he became an obsessive user of that technology. ‘No picture ever mattered,’ she once said, though it could just as well have been Warhol speaking. ‘There was never any subject that I was after. It was clicking it and pulling it out that I loved.’

It is ironic that one of the pleasures of this AGSA show will be nostalgic, enjoying the beautiful people of the past. That quality was not there when Warhol clicked and pulled. He was a relentless chronicler of the present. Nostalgia has settled on his pictures like dust. If we can, we must try to see through it to the true quality that his photographic works embody: a sublime banality that somehow delights as it numbs.

Andy Warhol & Photography: A Social Media, Art Gallery Of South Australia, North Terrace, 3 March–14 May, 10am–5pm.