I Am a Camera - three books about Andy Warhol - Review

Andy Warhol: Photography. Zurich: Edition Stemmle, 1999. Includes essays by Christopher Heinrich, Mark Francis, John Smith, Ludger Derenthal, Margery King, Dorte Zbikowski, Candice Breitz, Karin Schick, Reva Wolf, and Hubertus Bertin. 400 pp., 110 color ills., 300 b/w. $75.

Gordon Baldwin and Judith Keller. Nadar-Warhol: Paris-New York, Photography and Fame. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1999. Introduction by Richard Brilliant. 240 pp., 124 color ills., 7 b/w. $60.

Jonathan P. Binstock. Andy Warhol: Social Observer. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 2000. Includes essays by Binstock, Maurice Berger, and Trevor Fairbrother. 64 pp., 30 color ills,, 36 b/w. $19.95 paper.

The scholarly drive to reassess the role of photography in Andy Warhol's work, long overdue, has lately been going full throttle, fueled by access to the tens of thousands of negatives, prints, Polaroids, and photobooth strips in the artist's archives, along with innumerable clippings, press photos, and postcards. As we learn in Andy Warhol: Photography, he was obsessed with malting photographs (he shot at least a roll a day for the last decade of his life), collecting them (a thousand or so examples from his collection, ranging from Hollywood head shots to Man Ray's Rayograms, were sold at auction after his death, and many more remain in his archive), using them as the basis for a half-dozen books and hundreds of silkscreen paintings over a twenty-five year span. Warhol claimed in 1980 that he "didn't believe in art" but that he "believed in photography." [1] If we accept this remark at face value (Warhol seems to have backed it up with ample physical evidence, though he neither called himself a "photographe r," nor, by and large, did he exhibit his photographs), there still remains the question of what we mean, and what Warhol meant, by "photography." Is photography a form, characterized by mechanized production of images and endless possibilities for replicating them? Or is it content, namely the social world, from the highborn to the low-down and all that lies in between, that has been the principal target of photography since its inception? Did Warhol "believe" in the medium of photography, or in its subject matter? If this form-and-content distinction is ultimately a false one, it nonetheless divides three recent exhibition catalogues, all with scholarly essays, on the subject of Warhol and photography.

By design as well as through sheer copiousness of material, Andy Warhol: Photography, a collaboration between the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and the Hamburg Kunsthalle, subsumes the issue of photography's subjects in that of its medium. The book represents, in the words of co-organizer Uwe M. Schneede, "an attempt to understand the dazzling Warhol phenomenon through its very essence: photography" (6). With ova four hundred illustrations, divided into provisional subject categories ("Sex & Food & Photography," "Parties & People"), Andy Warhol: Photography makes the case for the seamlessness of Warhol's photographic oeuvre, expansively defined to encompass everything from collected publicity stills to fabricated silkscreen paintings, from 16mm films to photobooth strips, and even the many images taken by other photographers of Warhol, who, as Thomas Sokolowski states, "perpetually lived in the shadow of photography" (7).

Warhol's attraction to found photographic images as artistic sources was initially a practical one, according to Christopher Heinrich in his opening essay, but eventually the tool of photography became a paradigmatic model for Warhol's art: "In the camera he discovered an appropriate medium, for the camera is capable of both collecting facts and recounting fairy tales, documenting and fabricating, observing reality and constructing its own realm" (17). The idea that the photographic operation was uniquely suited to Warhol's aesthetic, and vice versa, runs through the sixteen essays and interviews in this volume. In this light, Warhol's famous pronouncements, "If you want to know everything about Andy Warhol you need to look at the surface," and, reason I'm painting this way is that I want to be a machine," suggest the artist's rhetorical identification with the impenetrable flatness of photographs, on one hand, and the mechanics of the camera, on the other.

In an essay emphasizing the continuity of photographic practice at all stages of Warhol's career, Mark Francis argues that the "language of photography is essentially at the root of [Warhol's] work" (19). Francis follows Warhol's involvement with photography from early hand-tracings through the "three different photographic devices" that Warhol engaged beginning in 1962: the photobooth machine, which he used to produce images for his silkscreen portraits in the early 1960s; the Polaroid, which formed the basis of two decade of commissioned portrait work; and, starting in 1976, the 35 mm SLR camera. As Fravcis sees it, Warhol, after he began working with the SLR, went from having a utilitarian interest in photographs (even his own) as source material in his artistic practice, to documenting obsessively the world around him for the sheer sake of documenting, with no other end in mind (Francis estimates that Warhol shot over 100,000 photographs in his final decade, far surpassing his ability to use them in pain tings or publications). Photography for Warhol, according to Francis, was ultimately a "form of metaphysics," its goal the creation of a vast archive; the act of recording was not a means but became an end in itself, economically useless and for that reason "revolutionary" (23)