“I told them I didn’t believe in art, that I believed in photography.” Andy Warhol

In 2014, The Warhol Foundation gifted its hefty archive of 3,600 contact sheets shot by Warhol in the late 1970s and early to mid-’80s to Stanford University, under the care of archivist Amy DiPasquale, to be made available to the public in an online database. The Cantor Art Center’s exhibition,“Contact Warhol: Photography Without End,” co-curated by Peggy Phelan and Richard Meyer, uses the sheets as a springboard from which to explore Warhol’s studio practice, with an organizational device of quotations from the artist, most taken from The Warhol Diaries (1989), inflecting the exhibition with the artist’s dry humor.

Poring over the dense contact sheets, housed in waist-high cases, offers an intimate glimpse into the parties, shopping trips, dinners and star-studded world of Warhol’s daily life. (An interactive digital display offers access to the full archives, from which one may ferret out individual gems.) Celebrity portraits evoke the hip scene of the era, including Debbie Harry (ca 1980), an otherworldly Grace Jones (1986) and Liza Minnelli (1979), one of Warhol’s closest companions at the time—along with his Minox 35EL. A video displays Liza’s photo shoot; John Lennon wanders through, shadowed by the dark and swarthy Victor Hugo, fashion designer Halston’s boyfriend and also a close friend of Warhol during this era. This is reminiscent of Warhol’s earlier Factory days, when Superstars and assorted crazies provided on ongoing stream of activity and inspiration.

Warhol was witness to the emergence of the gay rights movement. Discovering an unexpectedly prominent queer presence one day in the Village, Warhol remarked “Now it’s gay gay gay as far as the eye can see.” This quip sets up the most controversial section, one including explicit images of Victor Hugo and talent off the street. A pair of silkscreens, Sex Parts (Hand Holding Penis) (1978), bearing somewhat abstracted images of an erect phallus and a prostrate posterior, hang near contact sheets, and enlargements, of Victor and assorted anonymous partners. This is challenging but important work, revealing Warhol’s resilient voyeuristic side and impulse towards the transgressive.

Warhol’s popular image as an asexual loner is belied by innumerable images contained in the archives of his boyfriend of the time, firmly closeted Paramount Studios vice president Jon Gould. The gelatin silver print Andy Warhol and Jon Gould (ca 1982) reveals Gould at the beach, clad in a Speedo, a tall, lanky figure with a dark tan, flanked by the placid, pale figure of a fully-dressed Warhol. Gould was to succumb to AIDS in 1986—a year before Warhol’s untimely passing from complications after gallbladder surgery. Warhol often captures the increasingly uneasy spirit of that time as the liberated partying atmosphere fizzled to an often tragic end.

Warhol’s photographic practice clearly presaged our current diaristic recording of every activity, and our obsession with social media. Where his art historical significance once seemed relegated to his Pop glory years, now returned to the spotlight, the ever-prescient Warhol increasingly appears to be a contender for the most influential American artist of the 20th century.