Self-Portrait (in Drag), 1981. Polaroid print, 3 11/16 x 2 7/8 inches (9.4 x 7.3 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York,Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee  2005.68. © 2009 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Photography was central to the work of Andy Warhol. Photographs dominated the mass-mediated American culture in which Warhol operated, and served as his image bank. While the artist most famously used found commercial photographs as source material for silkscreen paintings of celebrities, disasters, and other subjects, he also worked from his own images. From the 1970s until his death, Warhol made tens of thousands of Polaroid prints, a method that appealed to him because of its speed, ease, and flattening effects. Polaroids served as working studies for his commissioned society portraits; however, many were never adapted into silkscreens, but remained experimental, intimate prints that the artist preserved in his files. Among these was a series of self-portraits in drag, on which Warhol collaborated with photographer Christopher Makos in the early 1980s. These cross-dressing performances for the camera recall Man Ray's photographs of Duchamp disguised as his female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy. Warhol had a longstanding interest in drag queens, and more broadly, in artifice, role-playing, and the construction of identity. In his numerous self-portraits, he was less interested in revealing himself than in presenting a mask, just as he carefully cultivated a superficial, depthless celebrity persona in life. Nevertheless, in this image, his masculine features are barely disguised behind his wig and make-up, resulting in a poignant testament to vulnerability and exposure.

Ted Mann