nickdrake:

Andy Warhol and The Velvet Underground

group Portrait

with Nico

May 1966: Andy Warhol is making a guest appearance in Los Angeles together with the pop group The Velvet Underground and Nico. This is hardly his first visit to the city, but it marks his premier as a band ‘member’. Also present on the occasion is Gerard Malanga, who can hardly have imagined that his rather relaxed group portrait will go down in the history of photography as proof of Andy Warhol’s short but passionate excursion into Rock music.

The arrangement of the group expresses a historical reality, as it were: it reflects the actual dynamics of the band, even if the photographer, Gerard Malanga, has always stressed that nothing was set up or staged. “This picture almost didn’t happen,” says Malanga, by which he means that he stumbled into it almost by accident. That is, it was nothing more than a mere snapshot, a quick press of the button without any attempt at making ‘art’. But this very artlessness is probably what lends the photo-graph its intrinsic charm. From left to right: Nico, Andy Warhol, and The Velvets in a relaxed atmosphere - cool and at ease because, after all, they are just posing for their friend with a borrowed Pentax, not for eternity. All that Gerard Malanga wants is a small photograph, for as a poet, performance artist, and co-worker in Andy Warhol’s Factory, Malanga has not yet felt the call to become a photographer, and he only picks up a camera on rare occasions. But even so, he is nonetheless conforming to one of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous dicta: “You can’t photograph a memory.” In other words: when should you photograph something, if not now?