Exposures

Exposures was a photograph book whose history in the diary is also a record of how images and a public persona were packaged, circulated, and repurposed. Its title changed as the book took shape, its launch became a crowded press occasion, and its promotion carried Andy Warhol from a presidential box at the Kennedy Center to a bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard. Later discussions imagined the book’s material as theatre dialogue, extending its reach beyond the page.

A Book in Search of Its Name

The project first appears as work shared with Brigid Berlin and Bob Colacello. Warhol tried to contribute to their text, but his suggestions met emphatic approval rather than discussion: Colacello and Berlin insisted that the work was already excellent. Warhol left them to it, privately judging the text poor while conceding that the photographs looked good. He preferred the working title Social Disease, a deliberately uncommercial name that appealed to him precisely because it sounded like something people might avoid.

By April 1979, the title had shifted. When Truman Capote visited the office, he praised Over-Exposed, a name Colacello had obtained in California after speaking with Irving Mansfield. Warhol still favored Social Disease. The disagreement captures the project’s tension between a provocative, self-conscious identity and a title that might serve more readily in public. Neither early name lasted: by the time of the book’s promotional lunch that October, Warhol and Colacello were calling it Exposures.

Images, Editorial Work, and Publicity

The book belonged to a broader image-making culture organized around Interview. By 1976 the magazine’s glamour and self-mocking tone drew celebrities who wanted to appear in it; the promise of inclusion in the magazine had displaced Warhol’s earlier promise of a part in a film. Photographs and the people pictured in them were not incidental to this world: they supplied its appeal and its steady stream of new faces. Exposures emerged within that milieu, though the diary does not specify that its photographs were made through any particular portrait process.

The surrounding studio practice shows how carefully Warhol could shape a photographic image. For commissioned portraits, he took about sixty Polaroid photographs of a sitter, selected four for conversion into positive images on acetate, then chose and cropped one image. He might alter the sitter’s appearance by lengthening the neck, trimming the nose, enlarging the lips, or clearing the complexion; the selected image was enlarged before being made into a silkscreen. This process is not identified as the method used for Exposures, but it illustrates the deliberate choices and retouching that characterized Warhol’s wider work with photographic likenesses.

On October 31, 1979, Bobby Zarem hosted a lunch for the book at Maxwell’s Plum. The gathering was crowded enough that Warhol, Colacello, and Elizinha Goncalves had to work their way inside. Karen Lerner was filming a segment about Warhol for 20/20 and attached an invisible microphone, making the party both a celebration and a recording occasion. Three-foot-high initials made of ice were already melting. At least a hundred free copies were distributed; waiters took books and then asked Warhol to autograph them in the kitchen. He did not mind. The book’s publicity had reached beyond its intended guests into the ordinary labor of the restaurant, where its staff became readers and collectors too.

A Three-Week Promotional Tour

Warhol later described three weeks on the road with Colacello and Fred Hughes promoting Exposures. The tour began in an unusually elevated setting: he sat in Jimmy Carter’s box at the Kennedy Center. It ended in a bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard, identified in the diary as a B. Dalton’s that had formerly been Pickwick Books. The movement from presidential hospitality to a bookstore signing gave the trip a sharp change of scale, but both settings made the book a public encounter with Warhol’s name and image.

At the Hollywood signing, a woman with a knife wound in her stomach entered screaming that the man behind the table could not be Warhol. She insisted that the real Warhol was seven feet eight inches tall, unable to fit through doors, and too paranoid to stand in a bookshop. The interruption turned celebrity recognition into a dispute over which version of a person counted as authentic: the towering, fearful figure imagined by a stranger, or the actual author present to sign the book. Warhol allowed that her fantasy might not be entirely inaccurate, leaving the episode suspended between comic performance and the instability of public identity.

The Dallas stop offered a different measure of reception. Neiman Marcus hosted the group in its boiler room, where the young people present called the book neat and cool. A hospitable local man then offered to escort the New York visitors to a discotheque because he thought its atmosphere might require protection, explaining that it was a gay setting. The visitors laughed, checked whether he was joking, and found that he was not. The detail makes the tour more than a sequence of promotional appearances: the book’s travels brought Warhol and his companions into contact with local assumptions about sexuality as well as local forms of courtesy.

Gallery and Stage Afterlives

In March 1980, Exposures appeared alongside Popism at the Goldman Fine Arts Gallery and Judaic Museum at the Jewish Center in Washington, D.C. The works prompted visitors to ask what Warhol considered intelligent questions. One person asked whether he had used different pieces of paper to show the different facets of Gertrude Stein’s personality; he simply answered yes. The exchange records the book in an exhibition setting, where its presence invited interpretation even when the question seemed to Warhol to be an elaborate demand for insight.

The project also continued as a possible source for performance. Warhol and Colacello were still discussing Exposures with Lewis Allen as material for a play, alongside The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. By May, Allen had proposed Evening with Andy Warhol, featuring a dummy of Warhol onstage speaking dialogue based on the two books. The concept transformed printed language and public image into a theatrical double: the book would not merely be displayed or sold, but could supply words for an imitation of its author. In the diary, that proposed stage life remains a plan rather than a confirmed production, but it shows how readily Exposures could be treated as part of Warhol’s broader repertoire of images, appearances, and mediated selves.