Andy Warhol and his inseparable Polaroid
“The best thing about a photo is that it never changes, even when the people in it do” Andy Warhol.
The king of pop art par excellence, Andy Warhol, anticipated several decades with his famous Polaroids to the explosion of social networks, which, like Instagram, have become a true symbol of our era. In the same way, Warhol turned his iconic portraits into a valuable account of the social environment that accompanied him throughout his career, immortalizing the brightest stars of the moment with his inseparable Polaroid camera. This is the case of photography (35175118) that next July 5 we present at our auction, where Warhol manages to capture the essence of the maturity of one of the great legends of the classic Hollywood screen, such as Lana Turner
The relevance of Warhol’s facet as a photographer within the development of his artistic personality is completely unquestionable, as shown the more than 100,000 snapshots he took throughout his career . His love affair with photography begins around 1962 when the artist acquired his first Polaroid Big Shot camera . Fascinated by the advantages that photography instantly offered him, Warhol began to almost obsessively register everything around him, be it everyday objects, race riots, or the faces of the most famous people of the moment. Since then, he used his camera as if it were a preparatory work, being, as he himself stated, his particular pencil and paper with which he gave birth to a large part of his artistic corpus. In this way, his Polaroid became a fundamental tool in the process of making a later work that he often turned into screen printing. In fact, some of them, like Marilyn Monroe’s, have gone down in the history of contemporary art as true icons that are already part of our cultural imaginary .