Photobooth Portraits

From 1963 to 1966, Warhol made hundreds of photobooth portraits and self-portraits, many of which were used to produce silkscreen paintings. New York's first photobooth, or "photomaton," had been introduced in 1926, and the four-for-a-quarter photobooth strip quickly became a familiar part of the American cultural landscape. For Warhol, the photobooth picture was both technically and aesthetically irresistible: the process was fast and automatic, and it yielded a standardized head-and-shoulders shot marked by strong, flash-lit contrast, which translated well into a silkscreen print.

Warhol directed his sitters to a variety of photobooth locations in midtown Manhattan, sometimes accompanying them but often leaving them to their own devices. Alone in the booth, sitters often improvised outrageous performances before the camera, with the changing expressions and gestures conveying a sense of rudimentary narrative to the resulting four exposures. The vertical "film strip" format, too, offers a link to Warhol's early cinema and to the silkscreen portraits that he made from film frames.

Edie Sedgwick, ca. 1965
Photobooth photograph
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.