I by no means planned or plotted any of this. I have, nonetheless, constantly followed my mother’s dictum: ‘When possibility knocks, open up the door!’ — Bob Colacello
It Just Happened, Photos 1976-1982 is an exhibition of photographs by the American photographer and author Bob Colacello, documenting his very long-standing collaboration with Andy Warhol and the cycle of parties and travelling that animated their frenetic lives. Curated by Elena Foster and the Ivorypress crew, the exhibition will incorporate letters, publications and memorabilia together with the pictures, which assist provide to daily life the era’s emotion of hedonism and countless possibility. As Colacello writes in his introduction to the exhibition catalogue: ‘It just happened that the 1970s was the most extensive-open up decade given that the Roaring Twenties.’
Between 1971 and 1983, Colacello was the editor of Job interview journal and Andy Warhol’s suitable hand. On a single of his several journeys with Warhol, Colacello obtained a Minox – a small camera said to have been applied by spies throughout the Chilly War. From that instant on, he carried this pocket digicam with him to numerous jet-established parties, dinners and weddings held in these kinds of emblematic options as the Manufacturing facility, Studio 54, and presidential inaugurations at the White Household. In It Just Happened, Colacello shares images from his individual album taken involving the late 1970s and early 1980s, providing an personal and devoted chronicle of the intriguing social circle all around the so-known as Pope of Pop.
Barbara Allen, Thomas Ammann, Joseph Beuys, Peter Beard, Willy Brandt, Bianca Jagger, Robert Mapplethorpe, Valentino Garavani, George Hamilton, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Cher, Truman Capote, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mick Jagger, Paul Morrissey, Paloma Picasso, Audrey Hepburn, Robert Wilson, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, Jean Pigozzi, Lord George Weidenfeld and Raquel Welch are just a number of of the icons that make up the choose cast in Colacello’s pictures. This human body of operate captures like no other the two the privacy of sites wherever access to paparazzi was limited and the experience of freedom of the time.
In just one of the photographs on view, the flash of Colacello’s digicam reflects into a mirror in Roy Halston’s New York townhouse, reverberating in opposition to Bianca Jagger, who is dressed in black velvet knotted all around her upper body, although a male hand protrudes into the frame from the left. The ambiguous composition blurs the strains between general public and non-public: is this a dressing place, or is the actress outside, staying swarmed by paparazzi? Somewhere else, Robert Rauschenberg is portrayed with his suitable arm out of shot as he shares the frame with a painting by Ga O’Keeffe and a modest Buddhist statuette. Warhol, in the meantime, is witnessed sitting in his resort home having breakfast in what Colacello acerbically describes as Warhol’s ‘regular sleeping attire – Brooks Brothers shirt, Jockey shorts and Supp-hose socks.’
These ‘stolen’ snapshots, with unforeseen frames and overexposed lighting, display Colacello’s rebellious spirit and disregard for photography’s official conventions of symmetry, publicity and harmony. ‘It just took place that at the events we had been continually heading to in New York, Los Angeles, Paris and London, lesser-acknowledged men and women saved blocking my check out of much better-regarded men and women, but I took the photo anyway, simply because I realised events have been like that, manufacturing a layered glimpse that I came to see as my model.’ It is in this subversive frame of mind and irrepressible rhythm that lies the photographer’s contribution to his medium: the building of a new aesthetic id within just the photojournalistic genre of the 1970s and 1980s.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a book with the very same title, posted by Ivorypress. Conceived as a photographic album, the publication provides Colacello’s images in chronological buy, accompanied by captions handwritten by the photographer to explain and contextualise the photos.
About the artist
Bob Colacello (b.1947) was born in Brooklyn and lifted in Long Island, New York. In 1969, he graduated from Georgetown University’s University of Overseas Provider and two decades later on finished an MFA in Movie at Columbia University Faculty of the Arts. He was the editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine from 1971 to 1983. He then worked for Self-importance Truthful until 2017, crafting profiles and research posts on cultural, social and political subjects.
His memoir Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Near Up (1990) was acclaimed by The New York Instances as the ‘best-published and the most killingly observed’ guide on Andy Warhol’s internal circle. He has also published Ronnie and Nancy: Their Route to the White House (2004), the very first of a two-volume biography of the Reagans, and is presently doing work on the 2nd. His images book Bob Colacello’s OUT (2007), published by 7L/Steidl, paperwork the wild and glamorous existence of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
He has had solo exhibitions at Boca Raton Museum of Art, Florida Newport Art Museum, Rhode Island Vito Schnabel Gallery, New York and St. Moritz, Switzerland Mary Boone Gallery, New York Govinda Gallery, Washington D.C. Steven Kasher Gallery, New York and Ivorypress, Madrid. Colacello’s photos have been involved in group exhibitions at the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh MoMA PS1, New York Tate Contemporary, London National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg and Museu de Serralves, Portugal.
Commissaires d’exposition : Elena Foster avec l’équipe d’Ivorypress
Bob Colacello : It Just Happened, Pictures 1976-1982
21 January—4 March 2023
Opening Saturday January 21, 2023, 4 p.m.—7 p.m. in the existence of the artist
Thaddaeus Ropac – Paris Marais
7, rue Debelleyme
75003 Paris, France
www.ropac.internet
