Getty Museum
Self-portrait
Creator
Andy WarholAmerican Photographer · 1928–1987
All works by this person →> If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it. > > --Andy Warhol Thus Andy Warhol described himself, being deliberately enigmatic with regard to the depth of his talent. Having received a degree in pictorial design in 1949, he began his professional career as a window dresser and later as a commerci
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- 1979
- Medium
- Polaroid dye diffusion print
- Culture
- American
- Department
- Photographs
- Institution
- Getty Museum
In 1979 the Polaroid Corporation invited Andy Warhol to make portraits in its Cambridge, Massachusetts, studio, where the prototype of a new 20 x 24-inch camera that weighed eight hundred pounds and could produce color photographs in sixty seconds had been set up. The bulky apparatus could not easily be moved for compositional changes; it had to remain stationary while the subject was arranged. Then, when all was ready, Polaroid's technician was on hand to operate it. In spite of these restrictions, Warhol seems to have had fun making more than ten portraits--most of them self-portraits. Warhol made four extreme close-up self-portraits with the new camera in a single day, including this one. He seems to have quickly understood that he had to get very close to the enormous camera, to confront it almost, thus making a larger-than-life-size portrait that exploited the camera's unusual potential. He gazed upward and away from the lens, leaving the left side of his face in deep shadow. These elements emphasize and abstract the simple highlighted lines of his face.
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