«ANYONE CAN TAKE A GOOD PICTURE»

From 1976 until his death, 11 years later, he took at least one roll of black-and-white film every day. Colour, he said, was 'too expensive’, and it didn’t have the paparazzi feeling he liked. Night after night, he’d set out for his round of art openings, movie premieres, book parties, dinners and discos, his jacket pockets stuffed with extra rolls of film and batteries. 'It’s work,’ he would say, of both his party-going and his picture-taking.These pictures are just part of that great unpublished body of work. They encapsulate the full sweep of Warhol’s world, from William S Burroughs to Chris Evert, from Gloria Swanson to the Talking Heads. Because he was not just any photographer but a famous artist, a star, there is often a sense that the looking is being done at the man with the camera as well as by him. As spontaneous as these images may seem, they are intrinsically staged, with Warhol himself as both chronicler and catalyst of the moments he is documenting. And what moments they are. Only Warhol could get David Hockney in extra-brief running shorts, or Susan Sontag batting her eyelashes across a fancy restaurant table at Gloria Vanderbilt. Indeed, almost all the face cards of the late Seventies scene are here, at ease behind the velvet rope: Mick Jagger beside Catherine Deneuve, Roman Polanski, Diana Ross, Tatum and Ryan O’Neal, Liz Taylor deep in her Senator John Warner period, Arnold Schwarzenegger before politics, and OJ Simpson when everyone still loved him…

-Bob Colacello
The Telegraph
March 10 2010