“From the day I went to work for Andy at Interview, my life became one of great contrast,” says Bob Colacello. “Until then it was all about being in the middle. Suddenly I found myself swung from one extreme to the other, from drag queens to European royals.” Colacello, Warhol’s right-hand man and the editor of Interview magazine from 1970 to 1982, carried a Minox 35 EL camera around with him starting in 1976. In fact, he and Warhol had bought matching Minoxes in Bonn. It was the first miniature camera capable of making full-frame 35-mm. photos, and Colacello would “keep it inside my jacket pocket, and take it out when I saw someone doing something interesting.” His collection of black-and-white photographs is now on display at the Vito Schnabel Gallery, in Saint-Moritz, alongside new paintings by Francesco Clemente and Pat Steir.
“It’s the summer, and normally I’d be traveling,” says Colacello, who, like most Americans, is staying put just now. “So we decided to do this show, ‘On the Road.’” The photographs take you there. Warhol in Iran: “We went there to take Polaroids of the empress, Farah Pahlavi, for Andy’s portrait,” says Colacello. Colombian businessman Julio Santo Domingo on a boat: “Going from Cartagena to his father’s private island, Baru, where I got bitten by a tarantula.” Lunch at the home of Rolling Stones manager Rupert Loewenstein and his wife, Josephine: “A lot of Europeans used to go to Los Angeles in August to get away from the crowds in Europe.” Colacello’s day job allowed him to capture the candid moments. “I didn’t think of myself as a photographer,” he says. “I was just Bob, one of Andy’s kids. In retrospect, that’s why the photos are so interesting, because nobody cared, nobody was posing.” —Julia Vitale
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