Andy Warhol lived at the center of a social scene that put him in daily contact with players and wannabes from every walk of life — from film and rock stars to politicians and hustlers. An appropriator of media imagery for his early-‘60s Pop art paintings, Warhol started making Polaroids for his commissioned portrait paintings in 1968 and got hooked on snapshot photography when he acquired a pocket-size Minox camera in 1976. Using black-and-white film, he reportedly shot a roll a day, documenting the beautiful people, and everything else, around him.
Andy Warhol, David Hockney and John Abbott, ca. 1976-79. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. Courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery, New York
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In 1979 Warhol published his first book of photographs, which also included several pictures by his Interview Magazine sidekick Bob Colacello, titled Andy Warhol’s Exposures. Colacello penned the text for the book, with the help of Warhol BFF Brigid Berlin, and Christopher Makos, who made the edgy prints of the work, art directed it. The publisher, Grosset & Dunlap, nixed a lot of the images that Warhol, Makos, and Collacello wanted to include. Those rejected photographs are now the subject of Andy Warhol Unexposed Exposures, which is on view at New York’s Steven Kasher Gallery through April 10, and a new monograph, co-published by Steidl and Kasher.