Early in 1963 a collector named Robert Scull commissioned Andy Warhol to paint a portrait of his wife. He wanted something in the manner of the Marilyn Monroe pictures Warhol had just finished, meaning a large work for a wall, and Ethel prepared the way anyone prepares for a portrait sitting.
Warhol collected her and drove straight to an amusement arcade on Times Square, to a machine that gave you four photographs for a quarter.
A commissioned portrait, and a machine in an arcade
This was the first commissioned portrait of Warhol's life, and he could have made it in the studio with lights, a backdrop and as much time as he wanted. Instead he picked a machine that passers-by fed coins into for fun.
That machine had nothing to recommend it. It stood in a noisy place, had no photographer, nobody adjusting a light, and no interest in whether the person inside was a collector's wife or a girl just off a shift.
Those absences were exactly what he was after. A studio session would have produced the face Ethel Scull wanted other people to see, whereas the booth is not solemn enough for anyone to hold a face for long.
What he called into the booth
Warhol stood outside, feeding coins in one after another and calling instructions through the curtain. As the story is told, what he said amounted to: do not just sit there, do something, take the sunglasses off, run your fingers through your hair, smile.
Notice that this is the exact opposite of what photographers had been saying for a hundred years. A photographer says hold still, look straight ahead, do not move, while he was saying do not hold still, and paying by the round to make sure she never quite settled.
On it went, quarter after quarter, until there were more than a hundred pictures. None of them were staged, because the machine fires to its own rhythm and does not wait for anyone to be ready.
What came out was thirty-six pictures, not one
The interesting part is what happened next. With a hundred-odd images in hand, the obvious move is to pick the best one and enlarge it into a portrait, and Warhol did not do that.
He took thirty-six of them, silkscreened each one separately, coloured every panel differently and hung all thirty-six together in four rows of nine. The work is called Ethel Scull 36 Times and it now lives at the Whitney.
What the Sculls took home was therefore not a face but a stretch of time. The Ethel in it is laughing and hiding her face and looking away and pulling off her glasses, and not one panel was ever voted the official one.
That year he photographed the New York art world in a coin machine
It did not stop at one picture. Also in 1963, Harper's Bazaar hired Warhol to supply the photography for a feature in its June issue on the new faces and new names in the arts.
The list of sitters ran to architects, painters, writers, actors, dancers, composers and curators. A first-rank fashion magazine could hire any photographer in New York, and the one it hired marched the whole list into an automatic booth.
From that year alone he left two hundred and four photo strips, now held in a storage box at the Warhol museum. The number worth noticing is not two hundred and four but the fact that he kept them all, including the strips he never used for anything.
A single portrait is the product of choosing, four frames are not
Portraiture in the old manner always carries a hidden step, which is elimination. A photographer shoots thirty frames, shows you six, you choose one, and the other five vanish along with the thirty you never saw.
The chosen frame is always the one where you look most like yourself. It is true, but it is an assertion rather than an observation, because everything that failed to match the assertion was removed before you ever got to look.
A four-frame strip drops the elimination step. The machine fires four times to its own rhythm and hands you all four, so what you carry away is a run of four consecutive moments rather than a statement about your own face.
The off frame is the proof that a real person sat there
Look at any four-frame strip and one panel is usually out of step. Eyes closed, a half-finished laugh, or a head turned to say something to the person alongside so only half a face shows.
Almost everyone's first instinct is to want that panel gone. But it is the one panel that could not have been staged, and on a strip where the other three are tidy it is the only evidence that a real person was in the booth rather than a session that had been arranged in advance.
Warhol kept all hundred-odd frames and coloured in the ones where Scull was hiding her face. He understood perfectly well that what he was selling was repetition with slippage in it, which is why a slightly spoiled photograph tends to be preferred to a perfect one.
Reshooting one frame is fine, reshooting the strip is not
A browser booth lets you retake an individual frame, and this is the easy thing to misuse. It exists for frames that failed technically: half a head missing, a blur from a knocked phone, somebody walking through the shot.
Use it to make all four frames match and you are doing by hand the very job the booth declines to do. Four identical frames are one portrait printed four times, and four frames were always a sentence rather than four separate words.
The easiest way to avoid it is deciding before you press start. Keep the first two tidy, let the last two go, then look at the whole strip once rather than frame by frame, since examined one at a time every frame has something wrong with it.
What Warhol had to pay for now costs nothing
Each round on that Times Square machine was a quarter for four pictures. Getting a hundred took a fistful of coins, and that price is exactly why most people of the day took one round and walked off.
Warhol paid it because he knew he needed quantity. Not in order to pick the best frame, but to have enough frames for the repetition to mean something, and those are two very different reasons for shooting a lot.
Today another round costs nothing. The odd part is that once it is free people stop sooner, because what keeps anybody shooting was never the money but knowing what they are looking for.
That portrait began with a fistful of coins
A wealthy collector commissioned a portrait of his wife and received thirty-six photographs taken in an amusement arcade. The work sits in a museum now, while the machine that produced it was dismantled long ago.
What Warhol saw in that machine is still intact in the booth you open in a browser. It fires to its own rhythm, it hands back everything it caught, and it does not ask how you would like to look.
So the next time you look at a strip of four and think about deleting the panel that is out of step, remember that somebody once hung panels exactly like it in a museum. He did not pick one; he kept the run.