To understand Warhol, Shiner explains, one needs to understand the degree to which he represented the medium’s collaborative potential. Warhol’s Factory was a legendary space precisely because it managed to capture the way in which he was inspired by his Factory members just as much as he inspired them. That very symbiotic energy helped foster an environment that produced some of his most immediately recognizable works, such as the iconic Marilyn Monroe prints, the creation of which Kennedy happened to be there first-hand to document. “Andy was standing in the doorway of the fire escape at The Factory and next to him was a stack of rolled up acetates he used to make his silkscreen painting,” Kennedy recalls. “I asked him to hold one up just as this magnificent light was pouring through the door. He reached over and pulled one off the roll and it happened to be Marilyn. I fired off six shots and some of my most iconic images happened in that split second. Sometimes it is just fate.” In a sense, Kennedy’s photography is the closest the public will ever get to re-living the era itself. To him, the most fascinating element is largely the culture’s continued obsession with the era of The Factory’s reign. Even after all these years, The Factory and its denizens are a source of constant inspiration and tribute in the annals of fashion, music, and art. “People tend to romanticize the era that my photographs capture because it was such an amazing time teeming with life and change,” Kennedy remarks. “Everyone was inspired, and everyone was part of it.” Nowhere was this persistent fascination with Warhol and his superstars more apparent than in 2013’s Academy Award nominated Dallas Buyers Club. In the film, Jared Leto (who took home the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor), plays Rayon, a transgender AIDS victim at the height of the disease’s scare in the 1980s. Rayon’s tight-fitting scarf caps, bleached eyebrows, and a uniquely colorful make-up pallet are more than a little reminiscent of one of The Factory’s most infamous figures: Warhol muse and superstar, Jane Forth. “It’s funny, you know, I’ve had a partner for 18 years now and he has a twin brother and when we went to see [Dallas Buyers Club] I didn’t tell the twin brother that the character was designed off of my look,” says Forth, whose own awareness of the film’s inspiration came from a New York Times article that referenced the similarities. “At the end of the movie he came up to me and said, ‘Wasn’t that bizarre how much [Leto] looked like you in that film?’ And I said, ‘That’s because the look was created from some photographs of me!’” she laughs. Forth has been the inspiration for many of the era’s most historic trends—from Diane von Furstenberg’s wrap-around dresses, to the proliferation of colored eye shadow—but she still considers her time as a fixture of The Factory to be her contribution to popular culture. “At a lot of the runway shows I’ve seen them do the whole look - the faces I created,” she said, “and that makes me feel nice. I say if I leave this world and I’ve been an inspiration for something then I feel successful - that’s success to me.”
Andy Warhol with Bob Dylan and his Elvis Silkscreen, photographed by Nat Finkelstein, circa 1963
that would frequent the studio, as well as on street corners, where Warhol would often be seen handing out copies to passersby. This same era saw the emergence of the disco boom, which prompted a newly developed downtown scene that Warhol and his posse frequented. While The Factory still remained a well-established gathering ground for some of New York’s most hip figures, suddenly Max’s Kansas City and Studio 54 became new hot spots, where Warhol was often spotted with some of the epoch’s most famous faces, from Brooke Shields to Blondie. There was no larger catalyst for radical changes in The Factory’s spirit than Warhol’s attempted murder in 1968 by radical feminist Valerie Solanas. Solanas had been a fringe fixture in The Factory’s scene and had written the 1967 S.C.U.M. Manifesto, claiming that the next wave in progressive feminist politics would require the elimination of men entirely. On June 3, 1968 — the same year that saw the rise of the Black Power movement, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the growing presence of anti-war activism, and the rise of the Manson Cult — Solanas arrived at The Factory hell-bent on violently settling a perceived grudge exacerbated by her then-undiagnosed Schizophrenia. She shot at Warhol three times, the final bullet entering his lungs, spleen, stomach, liver, and esophagus. She also wounded two others. Everyone survived, but many say Warhol was never the same afterward, and neither was The Factory’s carefree atmosphere.
Forth represents a decidedly different era in The Factory’s history, having come into the fold in the late 1960s, when the institution was in a transitional state, shifting from artist’s lounge to legitimate studio. It was during this era that Warhol began to seek commissioned portraits of wealthy political and cultural figureheads such as John Lennon, Diana Ross, Liza Minnelli, and, most famously, China’s communist leader General Mao Zedong. In 1968 Warhol launched Interview, the magazine produced by The Factory and noted for featuring conversations among some of the culture’s most celebrated figures. The publication began circulating through The Factory itself, handed out to the crowd
“The Factory always had an open door to anyone. You could just walk in right off the street,” Kennedy recalls. Though he wasn’t around The Factory for the period after it, he could still feel the larger ripple effect the shooting caused. “Things changed unfortunately and it was much more guarded after that horrible day.” The general vibe that The Factory took in the months following the shooting made for a truly altered space, focusing heavily on Warhol’s recovery. The studio’s open door policy shifted into a closer-knit
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