Warhol favoured an approach – one hesitates to call it an aesthetic – that seems utterly artless, banal, even boring."įar from dismissing Warhol's photography, Zuromskis reframes it as not art, but "snapshot": Warhol is "less concerned with the aesthetic or formal innovation and more with capturing a moment or an individual on film". They are blurry, erratically lit, chaotically composed, and poorly timed. " photographs are consistently bad – for want of a better word. Most of Warhol's photographs were taken with various polaroid and inexpensive point-and-shoot cameras.Ĭatherine Zuromskis, associate professor of photography and art history at Rochester Institute of Technology, makes a blunt assessment in an essay commissioned by AGSA for the show: He bought a 35mm SLR camera in 1964, but quickly judged it to be too complicated for him, and bestowed it on Name (whose beautiful photographs are seen in the exhibition). While he was both enthusiastic and prolific (around 60,000 photographs were discovered after his death), Warhol was uninterested in the technical side of photography. ![]() In terms of photographic talent, Warhol's circle rather outstripped him. Summarising the scene, Silver Factory resident photographer Billy Name wrote in 1997: "Cameras were as natural to us as mirrors … It was almost as if the Factory became a big box camera - you'd walk into it, expose yourself and develop yourself." Not art, but 'snapshot' ![]() It also reveals a rawer, less polished side of the notoriously inscrutable artist.įeaturing more than 250 works drawn from almost 30 different lenders, the exhibition ranges from the bright silk-screen serial portraits for which Warhol is best known (including a set of 10 Marilyn Monroes) to his famous 'screen tests' (featuring Lou Reed and Salvador Dali, among others), one-off polaroids and photo booth portraits, and lush gelatin silver photographs he took of friends, collaborators and the New York scene. Loading.Īndy Warhol and Photography: A Social Media, exclusive to the Art Gallery of South Australia, positions him as a photomedia pioneer, obsessive documenter of his day-to-day life, and consummate cultivator of his own 'brand' who influenced the social media culture of today. Few artists have cemented themselves in the pop culture canon to the extent that Andy Warhol managed to - appropriately, given his obsession with fame and mass media, and the role he played in redefining art as an everyday commodity.įor all that fame, however, few would think of Warhol as a photographer - despite the fact that almost his entire output related in one way or another to that medium.Ī new exhibition opening in Adelaide this weekend shows the iconic artist through a different lens.
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