Ethel Scull 36 Times, 1963

Narrator: Ethel Scull was Warhol’s first portrait commission. She had expected that he would make a painting of her in his studio. But when he picked her up from her Fifth Avenue apartment, that’s not how things went. 

Richard Meyer: He puts her in the taxi cab, they go down to Times Square, he took her into an arcade, and he put her in a photo booth machine where you put—at that point it was four for a quarter. 

Narrator: Professor Richard Meyer.

Richard Meyer: So he started feeding quarters into the machine and saying to Ethel Scull, "Don't just sit there! Do something, take your sunglasses off, put your fingers through your hair, smile" and he just started basically directing her.

He kept feeding quarters into it until they had over 100 different images. 

You get the sense that Ethel Scull, in this photo booth machine, becomes an actress, and the character she's embodying is a version—or maybe multiple versions—of herself. And yes, it is herself as a celebrity. And that's, I think, what all those people who commissioned portraits of Warhol in the seventies who weren't famous wanted. They wanted the Warhol brand. It wasn't yet a brand here. Yet, this is what helped it become a brand, but they wanted to look famous through Warhol's style of painting them.