This is just too cool for school. I don’t say this about just anything, but Andy Warhol Polaroids (US$99.99, Taschen) is really the definitive picture book for every modern culture vulture, photography nut and pop-art freak who’s ever stared at Warhol’s near-neon screen prints of Marilyn Monroe and Campbell’s soup and wondered, what is going on with that man?
Consider this book a voyeuristic little peek into what went on. From the late 1950s until his death, Warhol carried a Polaroid camera everywhere he went to document the people, places and things he saw, and now these little nuggets of frozen time, taken from 1958 (four years before his first solo exhibition in New York) to 1987 (the year he died), have found their way into this book.
And because Warhol hung out with a whole lot of musicians, actors, other artists, and photographed a whole lot of celebrities – sports icons, writers, a few politicians – the book is a cultural who’s who of the late ’50s, ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. How many will you recognise, you people born after 1985?
FYI: The author, Richard B. Woodward, has been the art critic of The New York Times since 1995.
Andy Warhol Polaroids is out in August – just a week and a bit away. US$99.99 (S$137), www.taschen.com. All images courtesy of Taschen
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