Andy Warhol’s (1928–1987) celebrity portraits represent a significant aspect of the work of an artist who explored fame and its often brief half-lives, as seen in the artist’s oft-quoted observation about the possibility of everyone being famous for fifteen minutes. He captured beautiful society women with lips smeared with vibrant red lipstick, powerful men, and notable personalities from all areas of American public life. While some had become renowned simply for being famous, all had achieved legendary status of some kind. Warhol’s best-known portraits were canvases, where working with a silkscreened image, he could manipulate his vibrant color endlessly. Polaroid photographs, of which Warhol is estimated to have shot 20,000 (most were never shown until after his death), created the raw material for many of
his more finished pieces, and these studies have come to be recognized as a significant body of work in their own right, including a series of remarkable self-portraits. These small images also convey valuable information regarding his working process. About his motivation in making these pictures: “Color makes it more like a photograph…But in black and white it’s just a picture…A picture just means I know where I was every minute. That’s why I take pictures.”1
Introduced in 1948, with color film becoming available in 1963, it was the introduction of the SX-70 Polaroid camera in 1972 that revolutionized instant photography (he had earlier posed sitters in a photobooth machine). While Warhol worked with several different kinds of cameras throughout his career, he preferred the Polaroid Big Shot. It had come on the market in 1971, but after it went out of production in 1973, Warhol continued to use it as it resulted in a particular kind of image:
The Big Shot is a funny-looking camera, made mostly of gray plastic with no buttons to push and no settings to adjust, except for a ring on the lens which, when turned, makes the photograph lighter or darker. Unlike most of the slick, well-designed Polaroid cameras of the 1970s, the Big Shot has a non-retractable extension that attaches to a rectangular back that doubles as a handle and viewer. A ten-inch gray plastic module extends from this handle, which contains the flash cube. Because the Big Shot is a close-up camera with a fixed focal length of three feet, it is ideal for portraits. The only tricky part in using the camera is focusing the subject. When using the Big Shot, Andy would move forward and backward while looking through the viewer to make the double image become one. Once the subject was “locked in,” Andy would trip a simple lever at the end of the camera to make the exposure. The flash would go off, the film would be pulled out and, after a wait of sixty seconds, the picture could be seen. Instant photography was important to Andy for this reason.2
Warhol might make 100 shots of a single sitter, and making multiple images of the same subject quickly satisfied the need for instant gratification typical of contemporary life. The small distortions in the resulting images he liked as well. Their instantaneity also extended to their impermanence, and these small, chemically unstable photographs faded over time, embodying in their fragile physicality both the immediacy and the impermanence of the cultural milieu in which Warhol worked. The camera itself was also fragile, but the Polaroid company would repair them for the artist and Warhol stockpiled them in his studios. The speed with which results were realized linked the art and commercial worlds in which the artist functioned seamlessly. Given Warhol’s predilection for mass production (he called his studio “The Factory”), the predictability of its product reinforced his interest in commodification.
The Solari Foundation Collection has four Warhol Polaroids. Three date from 1977 (Arnold Schwarznegger, Dennis Hopper, and Liza Minnelli), and one was made in 1985 (Joan Collins). All captured their subjects at a particular moment of notoriety. Schwarznegger, who had achieved fame as a body builder, published his best-selling Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder in 1977. He had also embarked on a film career, and Pumping Iron had been released that year. For Warhol’s photograph, he flexes the impressive muscles of his right arm. The artist portrayed the two women in a more glamorous mode. Actress and singer Liza Minnelli had appeared in the film Cabaret in 1972 and New York, New York in 1977, and was well-known as a result. Actress Joan Collins was famous for her role in television soap opera Dynasty, which aired between 1981 and 1989. In the year Warhol took her photograph, the show was at the top of the ratings list.
Warhol’s 1977 Polaroid of actor and filmmaker Dennis Hopper (1936–2010), records someone who was also his friend. A prolific photographer himself, Hopper took pictures of Warhol and other artists during this period.3 As a collector of contemporary art, he had acquired Warhol’s Double Mona Lisa (1963), as well as early prints of his Campbell Soup Can and Mao series. In 1964, Hopper was part of Warhol’s “Screen Test” series, and in 1970 and 1971, was the subject of five large silkscreen and acrylic portraits on canvas. Hopper was thus more connected with Warhol’s cosmopolitan New York art world than were many of his subjects. Several major films bracket the era of Warhol’s photograph of Hopper. Easy Rider, which Hopper directed, premiered in 1969 and the biker movie quickly became an icon to freedom and rebellion. In 1979, he had a notable role in Apocalypse Now. A difficult individual, he had five marriages, and was notorious for his drug and alcohol abuse. Warhol captures Hopper with a surprisingly cheerful expression, as seen in his wide smile and twinkling eyes, a side of the actor likely known only to his friends. Rather than celebrating Hopper’s rough public persona, by choosing a less serious image Warhol suggests tension between his subject’s private and public selves.
Cameron Kelly
Andy Warhol, Dennis Hopper, 1977, Polaroid, 9.5 x 7.3 cm, SOLARI 05.001.003L