Polaroids

“I’ve never met a person I couldn’t call a beauty,” Andy Warhol famously said—and the rise of instant Polaroid photography in the 1950s gave him endless opportunities to capture any beauty he encountered. From 1958 until his death in 1987, Warhol kept his SX-70 Polaroid close at hand, relentlessly documenting the muses in his artist studio The Factory, the characters he encountered around New York City, and the celebrities he met in Hollywood, California. Among the 20,000 Polaroids left behind are portraits of stars including Grace Jones, Jane Fonda, and Jack Nicholson, as well as fellow artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and David Hockney. Warhol’s Polaroids were instrumental in his process of creating his master silkscreen portraits and have garnered strong attention at auction, most notably his Self-Portrait (Eyes Closed), which fetched over $250,000 at Sotheby’s in 2010.