Glamorous Polaroid portraits and intimate black-and-white photos line the walls of the Andy Warhol photography exhibit, which opened two weeks ago at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. The show, which runs until June 29, includes over 150 previously unseen photographs from Warhol’s oeuvre.
These latest photos join the year-long Warhol “Screen Tests” exhibit, which consists of 20 moving portraits of mid-century icons. “Andy Warhol’s Photographs” showcases a sampling of Warhol’s original prints from 1970 to 1987, including studio makeup portraiture, landscapes and still-life shots.
“For Warhol, photography was really about capturing the day-to-day existence,” said John W. Smith, director and a curator of the RISD Museum. “It wasn’t about how many photographers were trying to capture a perfect image, a perfect moment. It was being used as a documentary device, as a way of recording everything from the important to the mundane.”
Though the RISD Museum received the photographs from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts as a gift to the permanent collection in 2008, they have not been displayed until now, Smith said.
“It’s rare that a museum has a collection of a particular artist’s work in such depth. Having such a significant body, it allows for a much deeper dive into Warhol’s work as a photographer,” Smith said.
The exhibition was organized by both Jan Howard, curator of prints, drawings and photographs, and Tommy Mishima, a RISD graduate student in painting.
By highlighting photography, the exhibit showcases an overlooked facet of Warhol’s artistic career, Howard said, since he was predominantly known for his painting and printmaking, not his camera work. Many of these works in other mediums were inspired by his photographs, she said.
Warhol used his Polaroid portraits and black-and-white photographs differently — the Polaroids inspired paintings and prints, while his monochromatic photographs functioned as a “diary,” Howard said.
“If you’re interested in the social life of New York in 1970s and 1980s, that’s represented in pictures,” she said.
“It’s interesting to think about the different ways he would’ve used them had he lived longer,” Howard said — Warhol began his photographic career only in the last two decades of his life.
Warhol rapidly became a prolific photographer, churning out at least a roll of film daily. He used a Polaroid for his commissioned work, as well as a 1976 Minox 35EL black-and-white, a miniature automatic-focus 35mm camera, according to the exhibit.
The photographs vary in subject, with images of Manhattan celebrities and wealthy uptown couples — those who could afford the commission — and eclectic homoerotic shots and photos of everyday persons on the street. In one particularly striking image, Warhol takes a Great Dane for his subject, treating it like he would a human and capturing its doleful expression.
The exhibit was packed on opening day and has since proved popular with a number of students, Smith said.
“He used photography to make experiments and tests that he’d later use,” said Justin Tate, a printmaking concentrator at RISD. “I like the view that photography can be used to gather material for a wide variety of projects. I think he definitely did that and his camera was an extension of himself, of connecting with people in the moment.”
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