Unidentified Man

“The only reason to play hard is to work hard, not the other way around like most people think. That’s why I take my tape recorder everywhere I can. I also take my camera everywhere. Having a few rolls of film to develop gives me a good reason to get up in the morning.”

–Andy Warhol, 1979

In 1972, Andy Warhol bought the smallest camera available, which he carried in his pocket along with the tape recorder that he called his “wife.” Every day until his hospitalization and death in 1987 Warhol shot at least one roll of cheap black-and-white film and had it developed at a lab; every week he selected 50 images, which the photographer Christopher Makos printed in their shared high-contrast, rough-edged style. Warhol published a few of these snapshots in his magazine Interview and more in the book Andy Warhol’s Exposures (1979), but most of them he just filed away. Thus, the photographs of art stars and other celebrities are at once the hard work of a paparazzo and the memory aids of a diarist concerned with preserving his experiences of the most exclusive dinner parties and discos in New York City. Other snapshots recall Warhol’s classic paintings of commercial logos and television images.