Contact Warhol: Photography Without End

Photographs by Andy Warhol that have never before been displayed publicly are at the heart of the exhibition Contact Warhol: Photography Without End, which draws on a trove of over 130,000 photographic exposures that the Cantor Arts Center acquired from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in 2014. The collection of 3,600 contact sheets and corresponding negatives represent the complete range of Warhol’s black-and-white photographic practice from 1976 until his unexpected death in 1987.

The exhibition brings to life Warhol’s many interactions with the social and celebrity elite of his time with portraits of stars such as Michael Jackson, Liza Minnelli, and Dolly Parton; younger sensations in the art world such as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat; and political stars, including Nancy Reagan, Maria Shriver, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Contact Warhol, curated by Stanford Professors Richard Meyer and Peggy Phelan, traces Warhol’s photography from the most fundamental level of the contact sheet to the most fully developed silkscreen paintings.

In the extensive array of black and white negatives on view in Contact Warhol, one can see the stages of his decision-making process: Some frames are struck through with an X, others are highlighted in a waxy red crayon to delineate his final selections. Unlike many of the Warhol paintings that hit the auction block or headline a museum collection, these contact sheets bear the rare mark of the artist’s own hand.

Launching concurrently with the exhibition is the culmination of a two-and-a-half year digitization project directed by Cantor project archivist Amy Di Pasquale that will make the remarkable collection available to the public. The archive of contact sheets will be available through a searchable online database that will be accessed through the Stanford University Libraries, and both the negatives and contact sheets are available on the Cantor’s website. See the first public display of images from the Cantor’s remarkable archive of Andy Warhol’s photographic contact sheets, along with other examples of the artist’s iconic work.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.         

Image: Andy Warhol, Detail from Contact Sheet [Jean-Michel Basquiat photo shoot for Polaroid portrait; Andy Warhol, Bruno Bischofberger], 1982. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

Whether you go or not, the exhibition catalog, Contact Warhol: Photography without End , examines and documents for the first time Andy Warhol's daily practice of photography during the last decade of his life. Peggy Phelan and Richard Meyer analyze the contact sheets, never before seen, and their importance in Warhol's oeuvre. Accompanying their text and other essays are reproductions of contact sheets, photographs, and other visual material. The contact sheets present Warhol's point of view, unedited; we know where he was every minute because a photograph remembers it.

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