Portraits T - Z

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In the early 1980s I undertook a number of projects with the noted poet, Allen Ginsberg. Sometime in late 1984 he told me a man named Jerry Aronson was producing a documentary film about him and that I might get a telephone call about taking photographs of some of the talking heads scheduled to appear. The call came in January; the subject was Andy Warhol,

The interview took place at Warhol’s new uptown “factory” at 22 East 33rd Street. Aronson and his team were taken to a studio and told to set up. I tagged along. It was a large room; pictures in various stages of completion were scattered about. Finally, Andy Warhol appeared, said nothing, sat down in a chair, and was prepped. I took some pictures during this pre-interview stage. He didn’t give anything, no emotion, nothing. The interview was even less successful. It didn’t make the cut, and doesn’t appear in the film. I have no idea why Warhol was so bummed out that day; I didn’t say one word to him, but he was not a good interview, which I thought was strange since he published Interview, and should have known how to give one. My subject was very dull so I decided to make a double exposure and liven him up. Later, I even made some multiples and colored them in the same way he'd done to so many others.