Polaroid Big Shot

The Polaroid Big Shot was the exclusive camera Andy Warhol used to photograph subjects for his commissioned portraits. It served as the first instrument in a tightly managed image-making process: Warhol made about sixty Polaroids, selected among them, and transformed a chosen photograph through cropping, retouching, enlargement, painting, and silkscreen printing. The camera’s importance lay not just in capturing a likeness, but in supplying the image from which that likeness would be deliberately remade.

The Camera and Its Supply

Warhol used the Polaroid Big Shot exclusively for portrait photography. When the model was discontinued, he made a special arrangement with Polaroid Corporation to buy all the unused stock the company had. The arrangement secured his preferred camera for a practice that depended on a steady stream of portrait commissions, rather than prompting him to switch to another model.

From Polaroid to Chosen Image

A portrait session began with the subject posing while Warhol took approximately sixty photographs with the camera. He selected four images from the group and sent them to a screen printer, who made positive images on eight-by-ten-inch acetates. Warhol then chose one image, determined how it should be cropped, and altered its appearance: he might lengthen a neck, trim a nose, enlarge lips, or clear the complexion. The Polaroids therefore formed a pool of alternatives, not a final record; selection and cosmetic adjustment turned the subject’s photographed appearance into a designed portrait.

The Enlarged Image and Painted Canvas

After Warhol settled on the image and crop, it was enlarged from an eight-by-ten-inch acetate to a forty-by-forty-inch acetate, from which the screen printer made a silkscreen. Assistants prepared canvases in advance by painting them in one of two flesh-toned background shades: one for men and a pinker one for women. Warhol traced the image onto the canvas using a carbon transfer under tracing paper, then painted in selected areas such as hair, eyes, lips, ties, and jackets. The screen-printed photographic details were subsequently aligned with those painted colors. Slight variations in alignment produced the portraits’ characteristic shifting appearance.

Portraiture as a Sustained Practice

The camera’s role was embedded in a substantial commercial practice. Commissioned portraits were a major activity for Warhol through most of the 1970s and until his death, bringing in a large share of his annual income. The usual price was approximately $25,000 for the first canvas and $5,000 for each additional one. The Big Shot thus initiated a repeatable sequence that connected an individual sitting to a potentially multi-canvas work: the photograph was selected and reshaped, then carried forward into a painted and printed image. Its place in that sequence shows how Warhol’s portraits joined photographic likeness to deliberate artifice rather than treating the camera’s image as an untouched likeness.