Bob Colacello, Andre Leon, Steve Rubell, and Andy Warhol, Bianca Jagger’s Birthday Dinner, Mortimer’s, 1981. Courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery, New York.
In 1970, Bob Colacello described Andy Warhol’s film Trash as a “great Roman Catholic masterpiece.” Impressed, Warhol invited Colacello to write for Interview, which he had founded the year before. He had a monthly column called “Out”, where he covered art openings, movie premieres, cocktail parties, dinner parties, charity balls, and nightclubs frequented by celebrities, socialites, aristocrats, and politicians. Within six months of joining Interview, Colacello was made editor, a post he held for the next dozen years, where he helped to establish it as one of the leading magazines of its time.
During this period, after Valerie Solanas’s attempt on his life, Warhol became much more entrepreneurial and insulated, surrounding himself with the rich and famous. As Warhol’s employee, collaborator, and confidante, Colacello had a distinct vantage point by which he was able to survey both life and business at the Factory, as well as the larger culture, which swirled in and out of view. In 1990, Colacello wrote Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up (Vintage), one of the finest, most entertaining biographies of Warhol ever penned. Then, in 2007, he released Out (Edition 7L), an incredible compendium of his black-and-white photographs taken over the years.
Bob Colacello, Carmen d’Alessio and Oldile Rubirosa, Xenon, New York, ca. 1975. Courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery, New York.
A selection of these photographs is currently on view in Bob Colacello: In and Out with Andy at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, FL, now through May 1, 2016. This is the first major museum exhibition of Colacello’s photographs, which include candid snapshots of Warhol, Mick Jagger, Elizabeth Taylor, Gloria Swanson, Liza Minelli, Truman Capote, Diane von Furstenberg, Andre Leon Talley, Steve Rubell, Raquel Welch, Carmen D’Alessio, and Oldile Rubirosa, among many other boldface names.
Colacello’s photographs bring us back to a time and a place when New York City was one of the most decadent places in the world. As the city teetered on the edge of bankruptcy, the jet set partied without care, creating a space of wild abandon that existed between the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and the advent of AIDS in the 1980s. And all the while, Colacello was on the scene with one of the first miniature 35mm cameras, a black plastic Minox small enough to hide in his jacket pocket.
As an “accidental photographer”, Colacello found himself at the center of it all, where the masks fell and people were free to be themselves. With skewed angles, moody lighting, and a casual style of approach, Colacello’s photographs take us behind the velvet ropes, for an insider’s look at the beautiful people of the times. There is a sense of intimacy between photographer and subject, as though these photographs were being taken for a personal family album, rather than a monograph or exhibition. Colacello’s photographs humanize his subjects, taking them down from the pedestal upon which so many other photographers place them. The result is a warm, wonderful, and sometimes wacky look at some of the most celebrated figures of the late twentieth century.
Bob Colacello, Hand, ca. 1975. Courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery, New York.
Miss Rosen is a New York-based writer, curator, and brand strategist. There is nothing she adores so much as photography and books. A small part of her wishes she had a proper library, like in the game of Clue. Then she could blaze and write soliloquies to her in and out of print loves.
