Landscapes

Landscapes was Andy Warhol’s deliberately indirect name for close-up photographs of genitals and anuses. The images served as models for Shadow Paintings, linking an intimate photographic practice to finished works while leaving the subjects unnamed in the term itself. The diaries trace that link through pornographic research, late-night photography, stacks of Polaroids, and an argument with Jed Johnson over what Warhol was making.

A euphemism and its source material

The term appears in an entry describing a trip through Village porn-magazine shops with Victor. They bought material for research, then returned to Halston’s home, where Victor expected a model to pose for Warhol. When the model arrived, Warhol photographed him until he ran out of film. The session lasted into the morning: when Warhol opened the door, he was surprised to find daylight, and he recorded getting home at seven. In this episode, Landscapes names neither a conventional view nor a neutral study of the body. It is a euphemism for photographs of intimate anatomy, and a working label for images intended to become paintings.

The diary situates that shoot in a crowded Village, filled with people who could not afford Fire Island, and then in the private domestic space of Halston’s home. The movement between the two settings matters to the practice as recorded: the evening begins with public cruising and the purchase of explicit images, then turns into a private photographic sitting. Victor’s plan for a model to come over makes the body both the subject of the encounter and the material Warhol intends to photograph.

From photographs to Shadow Paintings

The relationship between the photographs and the paintings is stated plainly in the later entries. At the office, Victor began pulling out Shadow Paintings made from the Landscapes; the diary identifies the photographed men as the models for those works. In another entry, Jed Johnson came into Warhol’s work area and saw stacks of Polaroids of the Landscapes. He reacted angrily, accusing Warhol of having sunk to a low level by spending his time on such images. Warhol was upset by Johnson’s reaction, and their argument spoiled the afternoon; when Warhol called Jed later, Jed hung up on him.

The photographs therefore existed not only as private records of a shoot but also as an accumulating archive in the workplace. The stacks made the project visible to someone close to Warhol before the resulting paintings were being handled. Victor’s act of bringing out the finished works and Jed’s discovery of the Polaroids expose two different points in the same chain: the images could be presented as paintings, but their photographic source could provoke personal disapproval. That tension makes Landscapes more than a discreet label for subject matter; it marks a practice whose private source and public artistic form did not carry the same meaning for everyone around Warhol.

Photography across Warhol’s practice

The diaries place Landscapes alongside other uses of the camera without documenting the same procedure for each. For the Athletes series, Warhol bought a new camera before photographing Chris Evert. In another sitting, he used ten rolls of film to photograph Sylvester Stallone, whose proportions seemed to change dramatically between frontal and side views. These entries show the camera used to study and construct public likenesses as well as to make the intimate images called Landscapes. They do not establish that the Landscapes followed the same production method as the portraits.

The documented commissioned-portrait process provides a useful contrast. For those portraits, Warhol took about sixty Polaroids with a Polaroid Big Shot, selected four images for conversion into positive acetates, chose and cropped one, and retouched it before enlarging it to a forty-inch square screen. Assistants prepared canvases with colored backgrounds, and slight misalignment between the screened photograph and painted color produced the portraits’ shifting appearance. This carefully described commercial workflow belongs to commissioned portraits, not explicitly to Landscapes. Its relevance is the broader place of photography in Warhol’s work: photographs could be selected, altered, and translated into painted images, while the diary records Landscapes specifically as photographic sources for Shadow Paintings.

Private practice and personal friction

The term recurs in the diary as a matter of routine and as a source of conflict. Warhol’s stacks of Polaroids indicate repeated sessions, while the July shoot records the practical limit of one sitting: the camera ran out of film. The surviving account gives no names for the photographed men and does not describe their later lives; it instead follows the images into Warhol’s work and the reactions they elicited from people around him.

That contrast is sharpest in the episode with Jed. Warhol was not merely keeping photographs out of sight: the images were in his working area, where Jed encountered them among the materials of the day. Warhol’s distress at Jed’s condemnation, followed by his unsuccessful phone call, gives the project a consequence beyond its role as source material. Landscapes became a point where artistic work, intimate subject matter, and a close relationship collided, while the indirect name kept the subject matter formally veiled even as the photographs themselves were plainly present.