Birmingham Race Riot
1964

Andy Warhol made very few alterations to the source material for this screenprint—a photograph from Life magazine (in fact, the photographer would later sue the artist for unauthorized use of his work). Warhol simply enlarged and reversed the original image, which was published in a May 1963 photo essay about police dogs attacking civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama. Although several of Warhol’s series of the early 1960s touched on current events, the subject of Birmingham Race Riot (and thirteen related silkscreen paintings, made subsequently) is uncommonly political for him. Yet despite the photograph’s disturbing depiction of an African American man besieged by police dogs, Warhol’s deadpan presentation of the appropriated photograph makes the tone of his work ambiguous and difficult to gauge.