interview by Oliver Kupper
portrait by Summer Bowie

Jim Hedges is a debonnaire Southern gentleman with a Yankee sophistication who just so happens to have the largest private collection of Andy Warhol photographs. Many the world has never been seen before. A seasoned art collector, Hedges has become a historian, a scholar, and a gatekeeper to the bromide crystal cave of Warhol’s photographic imagination—as a body of thousands of images, the oeuvre is an x-ray of 20th century contemporary popular art. Behind the high-priced auction block megaworks that include the bright iconographic visages of Elvis and Marilyn, Warhol’s photographs exist just beneath the surface like an iceberg—polaroids, 35-millimeter, and photobooth strips are honest, true, hypervivid, erotic, pornographic and awash with the deep microscopic ribonucleic acid of Warhol the artist and documentarian of a louche, and sexually liberated, pharmaceutical zeitgeist. On view at Hotel Bel Air, Hedges will be showing a selection of Warhol photographs in dialogue with the work of Maripol, whose polaroid documentation of the late-disco and New Wave-era offered a complimentary, but equally electric, gaze to the Downtown New York glam-era. We caught up with Jim Hedges to discuss his collection.

OLIVER KUPPER You grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee and discovered Andy Warhol's work through Interview Magazine—how did Interview enter your life?

JIM HEDGES Back in those days you could go into a magazine store and spend an entire afternoon looking at things. I found a magazine store that had Interview and I got a subscription when I was 12-years-old. It was my gateway drug. It was my entry point to things, not in Warhol's world, but the cult of celebrity and what was happening in Downtown New York, which in the late seventies, early eighties, was a spectacular and exciting time. And then as I got older and started collecting art, I decided that Warhol's work was something that I was super interested in. After years and years of collecting and getting educated about the landscape, I started to buy photos by Warhol. But I had also been in the investment business for 18 years. As I started to transition out of that, I realized that art collecting was sort of like a misunderstood asset. 15 years later, it's my full time job.

OLIVER KUPPER So, at 12-years-old you wanted to move to New York?

JIM HEDGES My mom is actually a Yankee. And my dad is from Tennessee. So, I had cousins in New York.

OLIVER KUPPER And your father collected outsider art?

JIM HEDGES As a teenager, my dad started doing wood carving. Over the course of time, he started doing more and more large-scale, ambitious projects. And then he started meeting other Appalachian wood carvers. He was diving into the folk, outsider art landscape. Then he fell in love with self-taught African American artists. And he became a big supporter of theirs. He had a collection of over 2,400 works of art when he died. He was definitely a collector, but he would never define himself as a collector. But he was an incredible advocate in terms of placing the work with museums and getting big curators from New York and elsewhere to meet the artists. It's a totally different channel than what I've done, but it's definitely in the blood.

OLIVER KUPPER What did your father do, and what did your mother do?

JIM HEDGES My dad actually ran our family's charitable foundation and was an artist. My mom was an interior designer. And you know, my great-grandmother started the museum in our hometown. My grandmother was a docent. Everybody was around art.

OLIVER KUPPER With Warhol, did you start collecting his photographs first, or was it his primary works?

JIM HEDGES It was primary works first. I bought some Warhol paintings. I bought some Warhol works on paper—all sort of without strategy. I would purchase things I was very attracted to. And then I got more familiar with the breadth of the Polaroid body of work. And I understood that they were used to make the silkscreens. It became much more deep as a pursuit. But you know, he had a dark room in his parents' basement when he was nine years old. He grew up as a photographer. And he photographed virtually every day of his adult life. But what’s interesting is that all the iconic paintings, like Marilyn Monroe, were from film stills or newspaper articles. And to avoid getting sued, he started using his own source material, his own photographs.

OLIVER KUPPER Warhol existed in this very strange world between pop art and fine art photography, and it is something people appreciate more now as opposed to back then.

JIM HEDGES There are very specific reasons why it hasn't been elevated until recently. The last exhibit of Warhol’s life was a photography exhibit. If you rewind to the eighties, artists like Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman were thinking about photography in different ways, but photography never had the sanctity that painting has. But photography was going to be Warhol’s next big push. Six weeks after the show, he was dead. And when he died, there were tens of thousands of photographs in his estate. And his estate became the Warhol Foundation. The Warhol Foundation is in business to give away money to contemporary artists—it’s the largest donor to contemporary artists in the world. So, are you going to sell one of 56,000 photographs or are you gonna sell an Elvis painting that will bring in millions? The values were low with photography and it was never a priority. Then the foundation gave half of all the photographs away to collecting museums, because they wanted people to be able to study the photos. Which was genius because it solidified the curatorial study, but it also hatched the market. But then, they are left with 20,000 photographs. That’s when I started collecting them.

OLIVER KUPPER: So how many pieces are currently in your collection?

JIM HEDGES: Thousands.

OLIVER KUPPER: And those include Polaroids, 35-millimeter, the stitched photographs…

JIM HEDGES Warhol used six photographic mediums. He made 16-millimeter films. I have the only eight that are in private hands. And he also made photobooth portraits in Times Square. Those are interesting because of the serial repetition of the image. Then in 1977, Thomas Ammannn, who was a big Zurich art dealer, gave Andy a 35-millimeter Minox camera. In ‘77 Warhol stopped carrying a Polaroid. He only used the Polaroid BigShot in the Factory, in the studio, to do formal portrait settings. Then he was carrying the 35-millimeter around. So the final decade of his life was all 35-millimeter photos, unique silver gelatin prints. Then in 1979, he started sewing them together. Warhol would take a black and white 35-millimeter picture, he would print the contact sheets, and circle the images that he liked. And then he would print those 8 by 10. But if he really loved the image, then he would then blow it up to 11 by 14 inches and do grids. Again, going back to the photo booth. Those were the contents of the last show that he did at Robert Miller Gallery. Those were the most rare of everything because he only made 500 of them. And of the 500 that he made, about 300 are in institutions. I've got about 60 of them. At the end of the day, the stitched photos with the sewing machine, the serial repetition, harkens back to the 16-millimeter filmmaking in 1963.

*Grace Jones and Andre Leon Talley at Studio 54*, ca. 1980. by Andy Warhol

OLIVER KUPPER I didn't realize that he had a dark room as a nine year old. I know the Warhola family was religious and they would go to church, and the iconography of the saints in the stained glass really translated into his pop iconography—celebrities as saints. But I didn’t realize how deep the photographic process was to him.

JIM HEDGES You know, it's funny, at the end of the day, his photographs didn't really have an advocate before I came along. Which is not to say that lots of people didn't do things to elevate his work. But in terms of consistently positioning, educating people, getting the photos seen, doing the press, I'm the only person who has done that in the past 15 years. It's been great because what has grown out of it is my own education. I've had incredible amounts of fun with the subjects. I have met scores of the subjects—whether it's Calvin Klein, Bianca Jagger, Barbara Allen, or Debbie, Harry, the list goes on. In addition, for the people that collect Warhol's work, the photographs are fairly inexpensive—most things are between $18,000 to $48,000. On the far outside is like $150,000. I have one client who bought Tom Ford’s 96-inch purple Warhol fright wig self-portrait, which is like 8 feet by 8 feet. It sold for 60 million to my client and they have it in their dining room. At the exact opposite end of the dining room is the actual Polaroid that was used as the source image.

OLIVER KUPPER So it completes the story of the primary work.

JIM HEDGES I would even go so far as to say the Polaroid and the painting are equal.

OLIVER KUPPER It’s interesting, the evolution of how the photographs started off as artifacts of process in a sense to being elevated to a fine art status in of themselves.

JIM HEDGES Well, I've never liked the idea of the photographs as process material. They were made in the process, or in the service of making art, but they have always been part of the artwork.

OLIVER KUPPER I think what I mean is—in the realm of paintings—the photographs become artifacts.

JIM HEDGES It’s funny because to take it one step further, I have a collection of acetates. The material used to make the silkscreens. They're very powerful images. They're ghostly. Because it's either a negative or positive. I believe that people will view them as art because again sure, even though it's a process project, the artist touched it.

OLIVER KUPPER Maybe we can talk about your current show at Bel Air Hotel and how Maripol fits into the curation?

JIM HEDGES I met Maripol thanks to you, quite literally, and I was enchanted by her. She's smart as a whip. She's a genius. She’s a hustler. She's just all sorts of things that I find really appealing. So when I met her, it was an instant connection. And I’ve spent hours looking at material with her and not just photographs, but also jewelry and various designs and sketches. She has a very important story to tell. There aren’t a lot of women from those days here to tell the story. Going through the Polaroids, the degree of overlap is extraordinary—there are so many people she photographed that Andy photographed. There are just some blockbuster images. I want to elevate the work, juxtapose it with Warhol within the same era. So. I selected seven images and printed them very large in an edition of three. They are going to be crowd pleasers.

OLIVER KUPPER Maripol seems like a missing link when it comes to the documentation of the early 1980s club and nightlife cultures.

JIM HEDGES Well, what I like about her is that she's a truth teller. She doesn’t embellish. There's a whole host of people who basically have their own stories that they dine out on, or get paid five grand to talk about at a conference, but the stories are all myths. Maripol, she's the source.

OLIVER KUPPER She is the master of calling bullshit. She'll tell you if someone was lying or if a story is apocryphal. It’s amazing to debunk these things because that era was so full of myth.

JIM HEDGES I'm also impressed by how modest she is. She is super respectful.

OLIVER KUPPER My last question is about the Sex Parts and Torso series. How, how did you discover that work?

JIM HEDGES I almost have to talk about it concurrently with the Ladies And Gentlemen series, which are the drag queens. Andy enlisted Victor Hugo, set dresser and Halston’s boyfriend, to go out to the sex clubs in the Meat Packing district and recruit boys to come back to the Factory to take pictures of them having sex. And to give them bottles of beer so that they could make piss paintings. The Ladies And Gentlemen, that was Bob Colacello. He recruited those people from a bar in Times Square. But these two complimentary bodies of work are so endlessly fascinating. With Ladies And Gentleman, most of them were successful performers, like Marsha P. Johnson, who was credited with throwing the first brick through the window at Stonewall. Whereas the Sex Parts And Torsos people are anonymous, and unfortunately probably dead from AIDS.

OLIVER KUPPER Is the Warhol Foundation nervous about these works being presented?

JIM HEDGES No, I think they were just really happy to find somebody that wanted to buy hundreds of them. It's homoerotic work, but you'd be so surprised if who buys the work. It is not always wealthy, middle aged, gay men

OLIVER KUPPER So is there anything that people haven't seen yet?

JIM HEDGES Honestly, there's lots of stuff people haven't seen. For example, in May 1969 Warhol was hired by Esquire magazine to document the Downtown New York performance arts scene. So he went out with this Polaroid camera and he took pictures of some of the most outrageous performance art happenings. I've got 27 Polaroids that he made of a particular performance, which was this performance from a German artist where he is naked and covered in blood. I can’t really show that Hotel Bel Air. And I have some sexually explicit stitch photos, and nobody's ever seen those. I have a lot of stuff under the mattress, and when the time is right, I’ll show them.

Hotel Bel-Air welcomes a selection from the Jim Hedges Collection of Andy Warhol Photographs in its lobby from 14 February - 14 April 2022.