insights into photography
You may be aware that there is an exhibition of Warhol prints at the Ashmolean Museum until May.
This interview in American Photo is with a photographer who worked with Warhol at ‘The Factory’
If you like Warhol this will interest you
Nico
Velvet Underground
Billy Name, born William Linich, was a lighting designer living in Lower Manhattan in the early 60s who, in an amphetamine-fueled fugue, ‘redecorated’ his East 5th Street apartment into an art installation. He covering the entirety of his space in silver spray paint and aluminum foil. “I even painted the silverware silver,” he said. When Andy Warhol, who Billy had been seeing at the time, came over for a hair-cutting party, he asked him to do the same to a new loft he bought on East 47th Street, the site of the since-infamous Silver Factory.
Billy went over to give Warhol’s loft the same silver treatment as his own apartment, and ended up staying for several years, developing close relationships with many of the famous Factory denizens. He had never had a camera until one day, Warhol’s 35 mm fell into his lap and the rest became art history. Decades later, nearly every contemporary art museum in the world at any given time has at least some work by Warhol on view, and anything even remotely associated with the artist seems to garner instant attention.
Edie Sedgewick
Andy Warhol
The Photographers Gallery has an exhibition by three of the great artists and writers of the late 20th century, well that is what is says in a blurb. Three simultaneous shows at London’s Photographers’ Gallery explore the images of three artists famous for other forms. From film-maker David Lynch’s moody industrial shots to artist Andy Warhol’s snaps of kite-flyers and writer William Burroughs’s pictures of everything from Jack Kerouac in Tangier to a closeup of a fence, they are the most original material on display in the capital so far this year. Looking at the images on The Guardian site I am not so sure about Burroughs, Lynch and Warhol photographic credentials, I heard on the radio, a culture show that Lynch really held it together and made the whole exhibition meaningful, his images look much like those any aspiring photography student might make. Anyway what do I know, decide for yourselves here
William S Burroughs – Untitled, 1975Photograph: LACMA/William S Burroughs l Untitled, 1975 Estate of William S Burroughs
William S Burroughs – Untitled, c1972Photograph: Estate of William S Burroughs
Andy Warhol – Jerry Hall, 1976-1987Photograph: The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London Courtesy Bischofberger Collection, Switzerland
David Lynch – Untitled (Łódź), 2000Photograph: © Collection of the artist
OK these are not our choice but that of Sean O’Hagan writing in the Guardian. Sean is a really excellent writer on photography and whenever we feature one of his pieces we get comments both in agreement and opposition. This list is by our consideration controversial and seems to miss some of the obvious and maybe that is the point. We would ask, where is Robert Mapplethorpe or more importantly Cindy Sherman but that is something you might completely disagree with. Do go and have a look and either nod sagely in agreement with Sean or howl at all you think he has missed.
From Andy Warhol in drag and Giles Duley’s ‘broken statue’, to John Coplans’s back and Gillian Wearing as her father
Andy Warhol: Self-portrait in Drag, 1981. Photograph: The Andy Warhol Foundation
Warhol’s pop art depended on photography. He used found photographic images as the basis for many of his silk-screen paintings, but he also took thousands of Polaroids. Some became the source material for his commissioned portraits, but most were filed away in his archive – a kind of intimate visual record of his life. His most famous self-portrait features an exaggerated version of himself in a fright wig, but the series of self-portraits he made of himself in drag in 1981 is both more restrained and more formally accomplished. Here, the persona of celebrity blankness he so carefully cultivated is refined to an almost self-parodic extent: a mask of a mask.
Photographs of Andy Warhol in ladies’ wigs and full make-up have gone on display in the UK for the first time. His friend and collaborator Christopher Makos, who took the photos, talks about working with the patriarch of pop art. By Ian Youngs Arts reporter, BBC News...more
Christopher Makos is an unusual photographer and his website is worth a visit
Warhol and the Diva is at The Lowry in Salford until 25 September. Christopher Makos’ new book Tyrants and Lederhosen, a collaboration with Paul Solberg under the name The Hilton Brothers, will be published in October.
Oxford School of Photography 