Bob Colacello

In the early 1970s, at the height of his fame, Andy Warhol began producing staged Polaroid portraits of celebrities, friends, and casual acquaintances, many of them studies for his commissioned silkscreen prints and paintings. His tool of choice was a Polaroid Big Shot, an instant film camera fitted with a fixed focal length that made it ideal for portraiture. Warhol often took multiple photographs of his subjects in order to capture their behavioral nuances. The tightly cropped format and a camera-mounted flash reduced features to flat planes and abstract shapes, making the images perfect for use in the silkscreen process. The sitter featured here, Bob Colacello, writer and former editor of Warhol's Interview magazine, recalled that the artist tried to convince him to change his name to Bob Cola, as this "pop" reference would lend itself to fame.