Winston Man

Andy Warhol used his art to comment upon the ubiquity of large-than-life celebrities and iconic American brands. Throughout his career Warhol took tens of thousands of photographs with instant (Polaroid) cameras or point-and-shoot 35mm cameras, which became his preferred way to collect snippets of everyday encounters. From 1976 until his death in 1987, he enlisted his assistants to stitch together identical black-and-white photographs—grouped in grids of four, six, or twelve—with a sewing machine. In his silkscreen canvases of the 1960s, Warhol had employed repetition (for example, reproducing a glamour shot of Marilyn Monroe 25 times) yet he had made nearly every image slightly different, accentuating the “mistakes” of slippage, streaking, and blurring that are inherent to the silkscreen process. In these later stitched composites, by contrast, Warhol opted for an utterly impersonal sameness, perhaps to stress that the photograph—whether of an iconic subject or of something more banal—is an infinitely circulating image.