Andy Warhol Family Album

Andy Warhol Family Album presents a collection of hundreds of Polaroids from 1972 to 1973 that captures Andy Warhol ’s immediate world of collaborators, celebrities, and friends. 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. By the early 1970s, the Polaroid would become his tool of choice and 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. Drawn from one of six Holson “family albums” that Warhol assembled as a personal archive, the exhibition features posed pictures, candid shots of social events, his home in Montauk, travels in Europe, and even portraits of his dog, Archie. Together, these photographs offer an intimate and varied view of Warhol’s world and day-to-day life. Andy Warhol Family Album is part of an ongoing initiative to present rarely seen works from the Whitney’s collection, following exhibitions of Wanda Gág, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, and Claes Oldenburg. Andy Warhol Family Album is organized by Jennie Goldstein, Marion Boulton “Kippy” Stroud Curator of the Collection, and Roxanne Smith, Jennifer Rubio Assistant Curator of the Collection.