Call it art

Everyone loves the random book reading system, but sometimes (like when you have just bought some new books and a few of them are too fun to wait on the fickle finger of randomness before reading) you just have to read what is sitting in a pile next to your bed. So, this weekend I jammed my way through A Year in the Life of Andy Warhol, a book of photographs by David McCabe with a bit of text by David Dalton (2003).

Warhol commissioned McCabe to follow him around and take pictures of him for an entire year in 1964/1965, but when the project was over, he decided not to do anything with the photographs. In his introduction, Dalton suggests that this might be because The Andy Warhol Persona was created right around this time, and Warhol didn't want the casual/goofy nature of some of these pictures to interfere with the carefully controlled image of himself that he wanted to share with the world.

If I knew more about modern art, I would probably recognize a lot more of the people that turn up in this book. It was fun to see Salvador Dali, Factory folks, and Tennessee Williams (who knew he hung out with these guys -- there are some great pictures of him dancing at a party at the Factory). [A few other photos from the book are up here, this is one of my favorites.] There are also series of pictures from the filming of "Vinyl" and "Kitchen" (the photo above is from the set of "Kitchen." McCabe is the one with the camera).

All the photos are fun to look at on their own, and while Dalton's text is occasionally a little gossipy and overly enthusiastic, it provides some nice context for the photographs and is generally engaging. The best part of the book is the focus on one year in Warhol's life -- you see the same groups of people over and over again (but not in a boring way) and you get a sense of how one encounter might lead into another. Plus, it's a book full of photographs of (and commissioned by) a man who made a career out of playing with the idea of celebrity and the public eye.

This book is also physically fun -- a smallish, dense hardcover from Phaidon that is fun to hold, with nice prints of all the photographs and a pleasing layout.