Photography over art

Photography over art describes both a principle Andy Warhol stated publicly and a working method visible in his commissioned portraits, photo shoots, and habit of documenting his movements. The contrast was not between photographs and all artistic labor: Warhol’s pictures depended on cropping, retouching, painting, and screen printing. Rather, photography supplied the image and the organizing logic, while the finished work made its construction—and its circulation as a portrait—part of the art.

A stated preference

At a lunch where he spoke and distributed copies of his book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, Warhol told the audience that he did not believe in art but believed in photography. The declaration sits alongside a substantial practical commitment: for much of the 1970s and until his death, commissioned portraits brought in a large share of his annual income. Portraits were kept in progress even while he worked on paintings for museum and gallery exhibitions.

Ronnie Cutrone described the move from celebrity sitters to private or non-show-business subjects as a natural extension of Warhol’s earlier portraits of famous figures. The change widened the field of who could become an image: a private commission could place its subject, in Cutrone’s account, on something like the same pictorial footing as a legend. Photography here was not only a favored medium; it was a means of turning social identity into a repeatable, purchasable portrait.

How a portrait was made

The process began with a sitting and approximately sixty photographs, all taken with the Polaroid Big Shot. After that camera was discontinued, Warhol arranged to buy the company’s remaining unused stock. From the initial photographs he selected four for conversion into positive images on eight-by-ten-inch acetates. He then chose one image, determined its crop, and altered the sitter’s appearance: necks might be lengthened, noses trimmed, lips enlarged, and complexions cleared. The photographic portrait was therefore shaped before it reached the canvas; selection and cosmetic adjustment helped produce the likeness the commission would present.

The chosen, modified image was enlarged to a forty-by-forty-inch acetate, from which a screen printer made a silkscreen. Warhol’s printer before 1977 was Alex Heinrici; afterward it was Rupert Smith. Meanwhile, assistants prepared rolls of canvas in advance, using one flesh-toned background for men and a pinker flesh tone for women. Warhol transferred the image with carbon paper and tracing paper, then painted in colored areas such as hair, eyes, and lips, or ties and jackets. When the silkscreen was applied, its alignment with those painted areas could vary slightly, producing the portraits’ characteristic shifting effect. The result joined a photographic image to visible acts of selection, adjustment, transfer, and paint.

The photograph as an encounter with the body

A sitting with Sylvester Stallone shows how much the image depended on the conditions of looking. Warhol asked Stallone to remove his shirt and used ten rolls of film because, as the diary records, he was difficult to photograph. His neck, chest, and hands seemed to change dramatically between frontal and side views: a feature that appeared narrow from one angle could seem enormous from another. The photographs did not simply preserve a stable body; the choice of pose and viewpoint made its varying appearances available for selection.

The television project on Carly Simon made the portrait process itself a public subject. An Omnibus crew filmed Warhol as he painted her portrait alongside Larry Rivers and Marisol. Warhol insisted that he would do no further work without payment, and Vincent Fremont arranged a contract under which Simon would cover most of the cost. The episode connected image-making to the business arrangements that enabled it: the portrait was at once a photographic and painted likeness, a paid commission, and a process presented on television.

Photography as record and circulation

Warhol also described taking photographs wherever he went as a way to prove that he really visited all the places he claimed to visit. On one drive along the West Side Highway, he lowered the limo’s dark windows to take pictures. People recognized and greeted him; later, at 23rd Street, a group insulted him over his wealth and continued following the car, frightening him. The camera in this episode served a different purpose from the portrait camera: it was meant to document movement and presence, even as the ride became an encounter he could not control.

The contrast is telling. In the commissioned portrait, photographs were screened, cropped, retouched, and combined with painted color before they reached viewers. As personal records, they could stand as proof of having been somewhere. Across both uses, however, the photograph was never merely an untouched window: it was chosen for a purpose, whether to shape a sitter’s public image, support a paid commission, or substantiate a claim of presence. Warhol’s preference for photography thus took form not as a rejection of making, but as a sustained attention to how images were produced, used, and believed.