Screen Tests / A Diary

n 1960's, Andy Warhol's studio in Manhattan, known simply as "The Factory," was the place where he produced his iconic silkscreen prints and the experimental films he began making in the 1960s. At the same time, this place became like a salon, where musicians like Mick Jagger and Lou Reed, poets like Truman Capote and Allen Ginsberg, actresses and fashion models like Nico and Edie Sedgwick, and other friends and iconic people around Warhol gathered day and night. It was the center of New York City's culture scene. Warhol and Malanga's film portraits, titled "Screen Tests," were made in the Factory, where guests were filmed with his 16mm camera. These films of subjects captured sitting still before the camera are recognized as some of his earliest experimental films and present a new approach to portraits in the history of art, much like Warhol's silkscreen prints, which many celebrities asked him to make as a novel form of portraiture. Some of the films were printed and published as the book titled "Screen Tests / A Diary" (1967) together with prose poems by Gerard Malanga, who worked for Warhol from the early on in the Factory years. This year marks 50 years since the first edition was published, and this is a limited edition facsimile reproduction.