Famous! (And Not-So-Famous): The Polaroids of Andy Warhol

From 1970 to 1987 Andy Warhol took scores of Polaroid and black-and-white photographs, the vast majority of which were never seen by the public. These images often served as the basis for his commissioned portraits, silk-screen paintings, drawings, and prints. Additionally, some began as magazine assignments (many for his editors at Interview), album covers for the Rolling Stones, or advertising campaigns such as the ones he created for Absolut vodka. In 2007, to commemorate its twentieth anniversary, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts launched the Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program. Designed to give a broad public greater access to Warhol’s photographs, the program donated over 28,500 of Warhol’s original Polaroids and gelatin silver prints to more than 180 college and university museums and galleries across the country. Each institution received a curated selection of over one hundred Polaroids and fifty black-and-white prints.

This January the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery will present the largest selection of Warhol’s Polaroids exhibited to date from the Gallery’s collection of 104 works. Also included will be a number of black and white photographs that reveal the more private side of Warhol’s life and his circle of friends. A large-scale screenprint, also donated by the Andy Warhol Foundation, will be on view in order to help illustrate Warhol’s working methods, as will models of polaroid cameras like the ones he used.

As the exhibition’s title suggests, the famous (legends such as Dolly Parton, O.J. Simpson, Bianca Jagger, Mick Jagger’s first wife, and Georgia O’Keefe, pictured with the sculptor Juan Hamilton) but equally others that were less so, reveal that anyone who was prepared to pay cash for a private commission could be immortalized by Warhol, often in their attempt to elevate their own status by association with the artist himself. More than simply a record of the sitter, photography for Warhol was a central tool to create identity, one often linked with celebrity in such a way that it became part of the process in validating fame.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website