Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s brief appearance in Andy Warhol’s diary captures a celebrity portrait session as both a practical encounter and an act of image-making. In Los Angeles on November 4, 1977, Warhol met him in Century City, remarked on his extraordinary height, and found him easy to photograph; the entry also exposes the racialized assumptions through which Warhol interpreted that ease.

The Los Angeles Meeting

Warhol went by cab to Century City to meet Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. He recorded that Abdul-Jabbar’s manager was good-looking and wore a hat like a cowboy hat but vastly oversized. The description places the manager in the scene, but the diary’s attention quickly shifts to Abdul-Jabbar himself: Warhol recalled that he was so tall that Warhol could walk between his legs.

Photographing Abdul-Jabbar

The encounter centered on making photographs. Warhol called Abdul-Jabbar fun and easy to photograph, but then explained that ease through a racial generalization about Black people. That remark is part of the diary’s record of Warhol’s gaze, not evidence about Abdul-Jabbar’s character; it shows how the photographer turned a particular working encounter into a sweeping claim about race.

Even the session’s equipment required practical intervention: everyone kept forgetting the basketball, and someone had to go and get one. The detail suggests that the photograph depended not only on Abdul-Jabbar’s presence but also on arranging the familiar object associated with his public image. The diary does not describe the resulting pictures or say how the ball was ultimately used, so the session remains visible chiefly through its preparation and Warhol’s observations.

Place in Warhol’s Portrait Practice

Warhol’s meeting with Abdul-Jabbar belongs to a period when portrait-making was a major part of his work and income. His broader method involved photographing a sitter, selecting and altering an image, and translating it into a silkscreen portrait. The diary does not establish that Abdul-Jabbar’s session followed every step of that procedure, but its attention to ease of photographing and to the missing ball shows the encounter beginning at the photographic stage, where a person and the signs attached to his public image were arranged for the camera.

The entry offers no extended account of Abdul-Jabbar’s life or later relationship with Warhol. Its significance is narrower: it preserves a fleeting meeting in which physical presence, the props of celebrity, and the photographer’s assumptions all enter the frame.