Edie Sedgwick
1965

In this strip of four casual images, Andy Warhol coaxes a range of expressions from Edie Sedgwick, the socialite, model, and actress who was a significant, if brief, part of the entourage associated with the artist’s studio, known as the Factory, in the mid-1960s. The work is one of dozens of photo-booth images of friends, celebrities, and studio hangers-on that Warhol created during this period, often shot in arcades on West 42nd Street in Manhattan. In the strip’s progression of photographs, Sedgwick, adorned with an animal print and smoking a cigarette, transitions from lost-in-thought innocent to coy vamp. Warhol relished the intersection of public and private worlds that the photo booth seemed to represent, and these images of his comely muse epitomize the emotional duality that he had a knack for capturing: she seems at once unguarded, caught unaware in the flash of the camera, and to be putting on a face, performing a series of roles for the artist.