Andy Warhol Family Album

Few American artists have shaped modern visual culture as profoundly as Andy Warhol (1928–1987), whose experimentation with mass media helped define what it means to be an artist in an image-saturated age. Photography was central to Warhol’s philosophy and his obsession with self-representation. He carried a camera with him wherever he went, taking hundreds of thousands of photographs during his career. Warhol purchased his first Polaroid in the mid-1960s, and by the early 1970s, it would become his tool of choice: both the Big Shot model, ideal for close-ups with its fixed lens and bright flash, and the more versatile, portable SX-70. This technology was instrumental to his process—forming the first stages of his commissioned silkscreen portraits and a mode through which he could document compulsively, treating his own life as material.