Andy Warhol is one of the most well−known artists of our time. Our society is so saturated with Warhol's prints and images that even if one knows absolutely nothing about art history, his name and work are familiar. Best known for prints like "Campbell's Soup I" (1968), he defined pop art in the '60s and '70s. The legacy of his simultaneous glorification and criticism of the mass production of images is continued in our society today, with his works pervading popular culture decades after his death.
"Photographs from the Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program" is a selection of Warhol's Polaroid pictures and is now on display in the Dean's Gallery at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). According to the gallery's Web site, MIT acquired 156 of Warhol's photographs through The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the foundation, which gave over 28,500 photographs to 160 university art galleries in the United States. Displayed in an office space, the small photos line a wall next to a group of cubicles. The gallery space may not be worth visiting, but the images are definitely worth exploring. The small Polaroid portraits and still lifes provide a microcosm of Warhol's irreverent genius.
Most of the Polaroids are portraits of various celebrities; one of the most intriguing is entitled, "Hearn, Pat," from 1985. The picture is tiny and depicts Pat Hearn, a New York gallery owner, framed by a blank white wall. Hearn's attractive face is covered in white powdery makeup that washes out her features and increases the harshness of the camera's flash. Her features in the photograph are highlighted by garish red lipstick, which provides the only color in the image besides her short brown hair. Through the photograph's simple and harsh formal composition, Warhol managed to capture a transient, moving vulnerability in Hearn's face. Her slightly hunched shoulders and deer−in−the−headlights expression result in a portrait that contrasts with the unforgiving nature of Warhol's medium.
Warhol provided a very different image in the Polaroid entitled, "Hall, Jerry," from 1984. The same harsh, red lipstick is used on Hall, a model and actress most active in the '70s, but Warhol did not use any of the powdery white makeup that covered Hearn's face and shoulders. Instead, Hall confronts the camera in defiance, her shoulders slightly hunched. She is the image of female sexuality.
Hall may be attractive in Warhol's image, but she is not exempt from any deeper conclusions. She is not smiling or laughing in the image. Her face is placid and emotionless, and she stares out at the viewer without any great self−assurance. The disposability of the Polaroid picture seems to haunt Hall's face; the image is as disposable as her youth was to society.
Not all of the pictures displayed are portraits. Also included in the collection are some Polaroid still lifes, such as one called "Easter Eggs" (1982). Instead of being an image of the colorful eggs normally associated with the holiday, it is a picture of an open carton of eggs shot from above against a dark background. Some of the eggs have been taken out and scattered next to the carton. In the image, Warhol captures the mediocre with his camera in a way that further reduces the objects to shape and form — preserving the eggs in the fleeting medium.
"Photographs from the Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program" is a small exhibit in an unlikely and slightly depressing venue, but it is still worth seeing. Visitors may be sharing the gallery space with unlikely companions, but the small faces staring out of Warhol's snapshots are riddled with meaning and emotion.
The bleakness of the Polaroid medium, only heightened by Warhol's use of white makeup and stark contrasts, reveals emotions that are stripped bare of any distracting material.
They are fleeting, temporary images of what turn out to be equally precarious individuals (or objects). Warhol's unforgiving ability to capture the mundane and the disposable is on display in this set of pictures, and is countered with an equally vicious exploration of equally fleeting, delicate human emotion.
