First published in 1985, America spans 10 years of photos taken by Andy Warhol during his travels across the USA. Now published in the UK for the first time, America is peppered with Warhol’s paradoxically naïve and droll reflections on celebrity,
First published in 1985, America spans 10-years of photos taken by Andy Warhol during his travels across the USA. Now published in the UK for the first time, America is peppered with Warhol’s paradoxically naïve and droll reflections on celebrity, Popism, beauty, muscles, politics, the future, love leagues, rent control, homelessness and washed-up Hollywood stars, amongst other things. “I always thought cowboys looked like hustlers,” he writes in his characteristically offhanded manner. “That’s nice. Cowboys and hustlers are quiet. They don’t know many words.”
Photographed from idiosyncratic vantage points, Warhol’s subjects radiate with a grotesque beauty. Grace Jones, David Byrne, Keith Haring, Mick Jagger, Paloma Picasso, Michael Jackson, Tony Bennett, Jean-Michel Basquiat, William S. Burroughs and Norman Mailer are some of the celebrities that appear alongside snapshots of daily life. Wrestling, beauty contests, weightlifters, shoe shines, dogs, horses, babies; “the real America is wherever you happen to be in the U.S. when you start wondering about the question,” he writes.
Then 57, Warhol also shares recollections from over 25-years in the public eye. “In the sixties,” he remembers, “I was invited to Truman Capote’s Masked Ball in the Grand Ballroom of the Plaza Hotel. The media was calling it ‘the party of the decade’ – not only was this before the decade was over, it was before the party had started.” At another point he claims, “I’m the type who’d like to sit at home and watch every party that I’m invited to on a monitor in my bedroom.”
Later on, he writes of a road trip from New York to LA. “The farther west we drove, the more Pop everything looked on the highways. Once you ‘got’ Pop, you could never see a sign the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again. We were seeing the future and we knew it for sure.”
Text by Ananda Pellerin
Andy Warhol, America is published in the UK by Penguin Modern Classics and out now.
Ananda Pellerin is a London-based writer and the editor of Wheel Me Out.
