Before Instagram There Was Andy Warhol- Polaroids taken by the Pop-Art mastermind!

“A picture means I know where I was every minute. That’s why I take pictures. It’s a visual diary.” – Andy Warhol

Nowadays, we have the constant urge to document everything and share it online on popular social networks such as Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook or Twitter.However, we are not the inventors of this phenomenon, apparently the pop art genius Andy Warhol was a pioneer in taking selfies.Before the trend of broadcasting your life online existed, there was Andy Warhol with his polaroid camera, taking instant photos of celebrities and random objects of his affection, for example, bananas.

Warhol’s art used many types of media, including hand drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, silk screening, sculpture, film, and music. He was also a pioneer in computer-generated art using Amiga computers that were introduced in 1984, two years before his death. He founded Interview magazine and was the author of numerous books, including The Philosophy of Andy Warhol and Popism: The Warhol Sixties.

The new photo book Andy Warhol: Polaroids 1958 – 1987 looks like a modern-day Instagram news feed. From the beginning of the 50’s until his death in the 1980s Warhol documented people and things that surrounded him in the everyday life.

To produce his silkscreens, Warhol made photographs or had them made by his friends and assistants. These pictures were mostly taken with a specific model of Polaroid camera that Polaroid kept in production especially for Warhol. This photographic approach to painting and his snapshot method of taking pictures has had a great effect on artistic photography. Warhol was an accomplished photographer, and took an enormous amount of photographs of Factory visitors, friends.

“These portraits signify who was welcome into Warhol’s club,” art critic Richard B. Woodward explains in the introduction of the Andy Warhol: Polaroids 1958 – 1987book.

“A place at once private, snobbish and hostile to middle-class squares and yet open to scores of outcasts, the prodigiously talented or the merely sensational and anyone making news on the front page or the gossip section of the tabloids.”

“Andy was probably the original Instagrammer, in a way,” Reuel Golden, editor of Andy Warhol Polaroids 1958–1987, told The Huffington Post over the phone.

Check out some of the Celebrities insta’s that Andy Warhol took.

Muhammad Ali, 1977.

Warhol has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions, books, and feature and documentary films. He coined the widely used expression “15 minutes of fame”. Many of his creations are very collectible and highly valuable. The highest price ever paid for a Warhol painting is US$105 million for a 1963 canvas titled “Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster)”. A 2009 article in The Economist described Warhol as the “bellwether of the art market”. Warhol’s works include some of the most expensive paintings ever sold.