Princess Ashraf Pahlavi

Princess Ashraf Pahlavi appears in Andy Warhol’s diary in a single documented embassy encounter, where an appointment to make Polaroids for her portrait became part of a crowded evening of film-world and social activity. The scene presents her both as a portrait subject and as a participant in a conversation about the city’s entertainments; it does not establish a broader personal history or the eventual fate of the portrait.

A Portrait Appointment

At the Iranian embassy, Ambassador Amir Abbas Hoveyda proposed that Polaroids for a portrait of Princess Ashraf Pahlavi be taken immediately. Warhol’s diary records that they went into a room for the photographs and that the session felt easy. The portrait was thus introduced not through a formal account of its creation or display, but as a practical task folded into the embassy’s evening.

The appointment belongs to a wider portrait practice described elsewhere in the book. Warhol generally began by taking about sixty Polaroids with a Polaroid Big Shot camera, then selected images for a screen printer to turn into positive acetates. He chose and cropped an image, altered features to make the subject appear more attractive, and enlarged the selected version for silkscreen production. The account of Princess Ashraf Pahlavi confirms the Polaroid stage for her portrait, but does not say which image was chosen, whether the later stages were completed, or where the finished work went.

The Embassy Evening

The embassy was filled with roughly thirty or forty film directors and producers when Warhol arrived. The portrait session took place within that gathering rather than in an isolated studio appointment. At dinner, Princess Ashraf Pahlavi spoke of the group’s familiarity with the city’s cultural offerings, including films and plays. Warhol also noted that she ate heartily; this is a passing observation, not a developed account of her character.

The diary records the event through quick changes of focus: the number and identity of guests, the move to a room for photographs, conversation about entertainment, and dinner. Princess Ashraf Pahlavi is central to the portrait plan, but the account gives no extended description of her views or of her relationship with the other guests. Its emphasis is on how easily a photographic commission could be arranged amid a highly social occasion.

Portraiture and Public Image

Warhol’s portrait procedure joined a posed photograph to deliberate cosmetic adjustment and the mechanical repetition of silkscreen. His account of the method describes painted canvas prepared in advance, with the screened photographic details aligned over colored areas; small shifts in alignment produced the portraits’ characteristic changing effect. First canvases generally cost about $25,000, with additional canvases priced at about $5,000 each. These details place Princess Ashraf Pahlavi’s requested Polaroids within a portrait practice that was both a recognizable artistic method and an important source of income for Warhol.

The wider diary also describes Interview as a glamorous magazine whose promise of publication drew celebrities and new faces into Warhol’s orbit. That context helps explain the prominence of image-making in his social and professional world, but the record does not say that Princess Ashraf Pahlavi appeared in the magazine. Her documented place in this material remains more specific: she was the intended subject of a portrait, photographed during an embassy gathering, with no further outcome recorded.