Stephen Shore and the Factory

303 Gallery, through July

# 1 Self-Portrait, New York, NY, 3/20/76 (1976–2003)
I was 17 in 1965, a senior in high school, but I’d pretty much given up going to school. I had lots of other things I was doing. I made a short film that was shown at a theater called the Filmmakers Cinema Tech. It was the same night Andy Warhol premiered a movie called The Life of Juanita Castro, and I was introduced to him. Andy was already well known in the NY art scene. I'd heard about the Factory and asked him if I could visit there, and he said yes. So I came to the filming of a movie called Restaurant and went to a party later, and after that I was hooked. I told my parents that I couldn’t even continue the pretense of being a student, and I started going to the Factory every day. I had been doing photography seriously as far back as I can remember, and that was my reason for being there: To take pictures.

#2 Andy with Mirrored Disco Ball (1965–1967)
Here’s Andy on the famous Factory couch. It was the only piece of furniture there. People would often sit on it for hours, staring into space, waiting for something to happen. Andy worked every day: He’d come in in the afternoon; he had a table in the front of the Factory where he’d have his projects. But there were these other people who’d drop by, and as far as I could tell, just sit there all day and wait.

#3 Edie Sedgwick (1965–1967)
Edie wasn’t one of the people I was close to at the Factory. We didn’t interact much. She was kind of aloof, but I was fascinated with her. She was amazing looking.

#4 Edie Sedgwick using the only phone in the Factory, NYC (1965–1967)
The phone at the Factory was by the entrance. It was a pay phone; you had to have a dime to call out, but anyone could call in. People had the number.

#5 René Ricard, Susan Bottomly, Eric Emerson, Mary Woronov, Andy Warhol, Ronnie Cutrone et al. (1965–1967)
This was at the opening of the boutique Paraphernalia. Left to right are René Ricard, Susan Bottomly, who was known as International Velvet, Paul Morrissey, Mary Woronov, Eric Emerson—I'm not sure know who the next one is, probably Gerard Malanga—Andy, Ronnie Cutrone and Pepper Davis.

#6 Edie Sedgwick, Ingrid Superstar (1965–1967)
Edie and Ingrid came from very different worlds. Edie was a New England society girl; Ingrid was from New Jersey, and a hustler on Tenth Avenue. Andy’s director, Chuck Wein, had picked her up there and brought her to the factory. Or at least that’s the story we were told.

#7 Andy Warhol, the Factory, NYC (1965–1967)
This was during the striped-shirt period when he and Gerard wore horizontally striped shirts every day. I’m not sure how long; a while. Andy and I both lived uptown, and when we’d wind up in Little Italy or Chinatown late at night, we’d share a cab and he’d drop me off. We’d often have very unguarded conversations.

#8 Nico (1965–1967)
I’d guess from the lighting and the background that this was while Andy was filming a screen test of Nico. I liked her. I was still living at my parents’ house and I would have these parties, and the whole bunch of them would come over. My parents were very excited that Andy would be at their house, and my father would chat him up. And there was one party where my mother befriended Nico, and spent the entire evening with her in the kitchen. Nico was telling my mother her life story while my mother gave her milk and matzo.

#9 Andy Warhol, Lou Reed (1965–1967)
Behind Lou and Andy is a film for a silkscreen that, as far as I know, was never made. It hung there for years.

#10 Lou Reed, Sterling Morrison, Nico, Ari, Moe Tucker, John Cale, The Factory (1965–1967)
I wasn’t at the Factory when the Velvets first arrived. When they started performing at the Dom, I went every day and helped with the lighting. Lou was the part of the Velvets I had the least contact with, though I was pretty friendly with the others. Out of the Velvets, I’d say John Cale was my best friend at the Factory. I was also pretty friendly with Sterling Morrison. After the Velvets broke up, he went back to college and got a degree in Medieval English Literature.

#11 Andy Warhol (1965–1967)
Andy in a different striped shirt. This was a period when I had a seamless white background up in the Factory for a while, and I would do portraits of everyone when they came in. Andy would sometimes act in a vague way in public, and I think that some people found him manipulative. But that’s not how I found him. There was something almost naive about him at times, which seems odd. One time, when he was filming Chelsea Girls, he told me he was thinking of showing it on two screens at the same time because his movies were so "boring." And I said, “Why don’t you just edit it?” And he said, “I don’t know how.”

#12 Andy Warhol, Sam Green, Marcel Duchamp, Cordier Ekstrom Gallery (1965–1967)
Sam, on the right, was director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia; I met him in 1965 when he gave Andy his first retrospective. On the left is Duchamp; Sam had arranged for Andy to film him.

#13 Edie (1965–1967)
I photographed Edie for years. Of the pictures of her I shot that I liked, there were maybe dozens. Of the ones I shot but didn't like, hundreds.

#14 Diana Hall pointing a gun at Andy’s head (1965–1967)
This was years before Valerie Solanas. She was just a girl who’d occasionally hang out at the Factory fooling around. Every now and then when Andy wanted to get rid of people who were just at the Factory doing nothing, he’d put up a sign by the elevator saying DON’T COME IN IF YOU DON’T HAVE BUSINESS. But he never enforced it as far as I could tell.

#15 Warhol with Silver Clouds in Factory (1965–1967)
What you see in the background are two of his projects: The Silver Clouds and the cow wallpaper. The Iast time I ever ran into him was on Madison Avenue at some point in the 1970s, maybe after a show he had at the Smithsonian in Washington in ’76. There was no way to know at the time just how important Andy would become, and how unique the situation in the Factory had been. I went because it was fun, because it was exciting. But I learned a lot: It was the first time that I really got to watch an artist at work, and it got me to think aesthetically in a way I hadn’t before.

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