'Every real moment' in photographic work by Andy Warhol

Abstract

Andy Warhol died in 1987 leaving behind a complex and profound body of photographs. Despite that his name has been associated with silkscreen canvas visages of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Chairman Mao, Warhol was also a photographer and filmmaker, in addition to public perception of him as simply a fine artist. For Warhol obsessively recorded the world around him for almost three decades with many diverse recording apparatuses. From 1962 his Polaroid camera, film recorder, photo devices, and tape-recorders were always present in his artistic life (Petersen 2011). This thesis therefore seeks to enter his world of photographs to analyze this less discussed body of works. Meanwhile it also aims to debate Warhol himself as a post-war artist, and his relationship to the recording devices. As mediations of gender and sexuality is explicitly expressed in his photographs, the thesis will from a queer theoretical and Foucaldian perspective, aim to examine the politics of the way in which the photograph allowed Warhol to capture homosexual bodies and same-sex desire. Analyzing these images, along many other photographs from 1890 until our contemporary era, the thesis enters the discourses of gender, sexuality and power, as well as wide historical and artistic discipline of the visualization of homosexuality. Entering these discourses the thesis will render new meanings of the means of the photographic image par excellence, by critically analyzing its relationship to the real as well as its power to mediate discourse and language. The argument that I will aim to develop is that Warhol practiced his art and used the photograph not only to capture ‘every real moment’, but also as oppression against the naming of the homosexual subject as the other.