Polaroid Corporation

Polaroid Corporation occupies two distinct but connected places in Andy Warhol’s working world: its Polaroid Big Shot camera was the instrument he relied on to begin commissioned portraits, and its advertising relationship mattered to Interview. Across the diary episodes, a camera model, a party, and a sunset photograph trace how the company’s presence extended from the making of images into Warhol’s commercial and social dealings.

The Big Shot in Warhol’s portrait process

For commissioned portraits, Warhol began by photographing each sitter with a Polaroid Big Shot camera. He typically took about sixty photographs, then selected four images to be made into positive images on eight-by-ten-inch acetate. Polaroid’s role in the process was concentrated at this first, essential stage: the camera supplied the photographs from which Warhol developed the portrait image. The later screening, painting, and printing stages involved other materials and practitioners, not work attributed to Polaroid Corporation.

The camera was not an interchangeable tool in the account. Warhol used the Big Shot exclusively for these portrait sessions. When the model was discontinued, he arranged specially with Polaroid Corporation to buy all the unused stock the company had. This effort to secure the remaining cameras makes the equipment’s importance concrete: his established portrait routine depended on a particular model, and its discontinuation created a supply problem he addressed directly with the manufacturer.

The photographs were only the start of a highly controlled sequence. From the four selected images, Warhol chose one, decided how to crop it, and altered its features to make the sitter appear more attractive, lengthening necks, trimming noses, enlarging lips, or clearing complexions. The chosen image was enlarged to a forty-by-forty-inch acetate for silkscreening. Assistants prepared canvas in flesh-toned backgrounds; Warhol traced the image, painted selected areas, and aligned the finished screen so photographic detail fell over the colors beneath it. Small differences in alignment produced the portraits’ shifting appearance. Polaroid Corporation’s camera thus fed a process in which a photographic likeness was repeatedly selected, altered, enlarged, and translated into a painted and screened work.

Portraits as business and public images

Warhol’s dependence on portrait commissions gave the camera process an economic as well as an artistic function. Portraits remained in progress even when he was preparing other canvases for gallery and museum exhibitions, and commissions provided a substantial share of his yearly income. The stated price was about $25,000 for the first canvas and $5,000 for each additional one. The Big Shot’s repeated use belonged to a steady commercial practice, not an occasional experiment.

The resulting images also circulated through public and promotional settings. In 1986, Paige took Warhol’s Dolly Parton portrait to be taped for a Today Show segment connected with the Neiman Marcus catalogue. That appearance was not described as a Polaroid Corporation project, but it shows the broader passage from portrait-making into television and retail promotion that framed Warhol’s work. The diary’s account of Polaroid’s camera is therefore part of a larger image economy in which a sitter could become a commissioned artwork and then appear in another media setting.

Sponsorship, parties, and social standing

Polaroid Corporation also hosted an Academy Awards party at Studio 54 in April 1978, with Warhol and Truman Capote as hosts. The party brought the company into Warhol’s public social world, but its organization proved troublesome. Invitations had gone wrong; Warhol noted the absurdity of a hand-delivered invitation addressed to him arriving at his own office that afternoon. The difficulty was not simply logistical: people who were omitted or unable to get in were angry, leaving the hosts to absorb the social consequences of an event sponsored by the company.

The guest list’s handling became a further source of friction. Bob suspected that Stevie Rubell had discarded a list of older guests, including Aileen Mehle, Ahmet Ertegun, and Mica Ertegun, after they had been cold to him and he learned that they had not received invitations. Warhol described the party’s aftermath as a low point, even as people later called to say it had been a great party. The contrast captures the uncertainty of sponsorship as social performance: the event could be praised overall while specific exclusions damaged relationships and reflected on its hosts.

Two days after the party, Warhol gave Ronnie Cutrone money to buy newspapers and check whether the Polaroid event had been covered. This small errand links sponsorship to publicity: the party mattered not only as a gathering but as something whose appearance in print was worth checking. The diary does not establish what coverage resulted, but it records the expectation that a sponsored evening might acquire a second life as a media story.

Advertising and leverage

By August 1986, Warhol was pressing for a different kind of return from Polaroid Corporation. At a dinner at Caffè Roma arranged by Paige, a Polaroid representative was present. Warhol warned him that if the company did not advertise, he would stop using its name. The representative replied that he did not want the demand to mean they could no longer be friends, then gave Warhol a Polaroid photograph of a sunset, which Warhol treated with amused skepticism about its personal significance.

The exchange brings the camera and the commercial relationship into direct contact. Earlier, Warhol had secured a supply of discontinued Big Shot cameras because his portrait practice depended on them; now he used his continued association with the company’s name as leverage for Interview advertising. The sunset photograph softened the business confrontation without resolving it in the diary. Polaroid Corporation’s significance in these episodes lies in that double role: its equipment entered the mechanics of Warhol’s image-making, while its advertising and sponsorship connected those images and their maker to the magazine’s finances and public visibility.