February 12, 2005
If you find yourself in Edinburgh in the next few months, head over to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art for the
Andy Warhol Self-Portraits exhibition, which opened this week. A review of the show in the Herald gives an overview of the pieces in the exhibit, which include Warhol’s famous photobooth self-portraits.
…[I]t is when he comes into contact with a real machine — the photobooth — that his self-portraits truly take off. The photobooth was Warhol’s studio as much as the Factory. In 1963 he made his first key series of silkscreens on canvas using photobooth pictures as a source. Warhol comes across like some composite portrait of an unholy triumvirate of criminal, celebrity and saint, dressed in overcoat, sunglasses, shirt and tie. Mugshot, publicity shot or studied portrait? The images are all three.
The exhibition closes May 2.
Another article on the exhibition, from Scotland on Sunday, mentions Warhol’s “early works and the original photo-booth snapshots on which they were based.”