Holly Fairgrieve in Conversation with Christopher Makos
Kevin Kendall in Red Bikini, 1986.
Christopher Makos’s photographic archive of New York in the 70s and 80s is a window into the one of the most important periods of the city’s history, one marked by extraordinary creativity and prolific artistic output. Famously known as the dynamic best friend of Andy Warhol, Christopher Makos’s photos document his time in The Factory, socialising with the likes of Tennessee Williams, Keith Haring, John Lennon, Jean Michael Basquiat and Debbie Harry. His new exhibition, “Dirty”, at Daniel Cooney Fine Art, features his images of 20th century icons alongside his illicit photographs of male nudes. Despite the celebrity element to his work, Makos’s photos are vulnerable, intimate and reveal sides of his sitters that are little known. Here, MADE IN BED’s Creative Director, Holly Fairgrieve, has a phone call with Makos to discuss his exhibition “Dirty”, the culture of New York City, his friendship with Andy Warhol and the art world today.
HF: The pictures in this exhibition were taken at a particular time in the history of New York City. Can you talk a little about how the city has changed? My father has lived in Manhattan for a large part of his life and moans about how ‘lame’ and ‘phony’ it has become compared to the 70s and 80s. What is your opinion on how the city has changed? And what do you think the long-term impact of Covid-19 on this transformation will be?
CM: Well, your dad is right. Before the pandemic started, New York City was just a cash register for rich corporations and it totally lost it. The reason why people came here was because they wanted to go to the clubs, they wanted to listen to music, they wanted to see the art. Then everything became so expensive because all the big brands and banks came in and took over. It became impossible for people to afford rent because these big guys were all willing to pay top dollar for real estate.
So, you lost all the artists and the young people who had been doing all the interesting things. We just had business people and wealthy tourists here. I guess it was interesting for a minute, but it got tiresome very quickly. My artist friends and I just kind of — well, we were hoping for something to come a long in the near future that would just shake everything up and get rid of all these people and all this junk. Because the city was just all about glitz. It was too much.
Then this pandemic came about and, of course, stopped everything in its tracks. As tragic as it has been, the good news is that the city is reevaluating itself. And, finally, the commercial real estate market is collapsing. The rents will get lower and so all those artists and young people who have made that mass exodus to Brooklyn will hopefully come back to Manhattan. The pandemic is making everyone reassess their values and New York has needed that for a while. We’ve needed to be reminded of what makes us New Yorkers in the first place; and the pandemic has done that.
HF: I’m interested in why you named the exhibition Dirty. It seems an especially clever title given the climate of a pandemic, which has led to both increased germaphobia and sexual frustration, alongside a lack of physical touch. Was this the impetus behind it?
CM: That’s definitely part of it. But [art dealer] Daniel Cooney actually reached out to me about a year ago asking if I wanted to do a show. He came over to the studio and I let him look through all my old photos. All the gallery owners in the city usually just treat you like a piece of meat - like you’re a product who they’ve got to flip so they can pay these high rents. And I know that the thing is, if you’re not Larry (Gagosian) or funded by the Japanese or something, there’s such a huge pressure.
But Daniel took such care in my studio. He spent hours pouring over all the pieces he wanted to be included in the exhibit and I absolutely loved his choices. I’m so close to all my own work it’s sometimes hard to see what I have. But he picked all these great things I didn’t even know I had - these far flung things from tits and ass to John Lennon and Andy (Warhol) and Christopher Reeve - I mean it was all over the map.
And then he had all these sexy boy and girl pictures. One picture he chose was just this great photo of this young man in a red bikini. It reminded me so much of what’s going on on TikTok and Instagram. I mean, this photo was taken in the 70s and it looks so contemporary to me. I saw that picture and thought: “Number one, it’s red.” The red pops out. I said “bingo!” And then I thought: “Oh wow, some people might think that’s dirty, but not me and not my friends. I think it’s great.” Then I thought about the pandemic and how nobody can touch each other and so it totally fit. Man Ray [the surrealist artist with whom Makos apprenticed] always told me to trust my instinct. That word came up for me and Daniel Cooney just loved it right away.
HF: Calling it Dirty is also interesting due to the nature of the photographs. It leads one to expect oiled male bodies in leather and chains a la Mapplethorpe. But the photos are much more sensitive than that. Is the title also a comment on male vulnerability?
CM: It’s amazing that you talk about male vulnerability because that’s what it was. There were other really important photographers working at the time the photos were taken also exploring masculinity. Mapplethorpe was one. His stuff was very raw and very much his sensibility. It was interesting because he had those very sexual images and then he had the flowers so that was sort of, well very erotic. Then you had Bruce Weber, who took the male image and made it highly romanticised. His work was all about the American male, football, all of that kind of stuff.
My pictures of males, on the other hand, were much more about who they actually were. They would come to the studio and just present themselves. I wasn’t trying to put my stamp on them. I would just let them be who they were. In the 70s and 80s I think guys were much more open to being vulnerable and being honest about who they were. Guys today are so into themselves in a way that they were not before.
Guys today are so self-aware and so vain. Far more than a lot of women. There is no naivety to photographing men now. They know exactly how they want to look and present themselves in photographs and are so concerned to cultivate an image that they want to project.
Keith Haring and Juan Dubose at the Piers, 1980s.
HF: On that note, I’m very struck by how contemporary the images feel. It’s tempting to think that our generation has made huge progress when it comes to moving towards increasingly complex and fluid definitions of sex and gender, and it’s clear in many respects we have. But what’s your opinion on the state of sexual and gender freedom today as compared to the time when you took the photos in Dirty?
CM: In the 70s and 80s when there was the Studio 54 culture and all that, no one had to identify with anything you just were who you were. You loved who you wanted to love; you didn’t have to identify with a gender or a group.
But that was particular to a very specific group in New York that I was photographing. Today, there is a very big preoccupation with identification with certain sects and groups within LGBTQ+ culture, which there never used to be. But apart from that I think there is a huge openness in the younger generation today. I think the acceptance that sexuality and gender are not defined by your sex organs is so well understood in a way that it never has been before. The wider acceptance and acknowledgement of non-binary people and bisexuality is so encouraging.
It’s really a different moment. I mean the ice caps are melting, there is a pandemic – there are so many pressing disasters to deal with, so it’s good more people are just letting others be who they are.
HF: You seem to draw something real out of the celebrities included in Dirty, especially Warhol and Keith Haring. There is something that’s the essence of them, not a caricature. How did you achieve this? Were you striving to capture the tension between vulnerability and fame? What about celebrity is Dirty to you?
CM: Being in New York in the art scene, being so immersed in that culture, nobody was a celebrity to me. If I’m photographing somebody that I don’t know I don’t have any awe around them. They are just humans who are successful at what they do. The media turns them into something supposedly untouchable, but they are not.
Warhol was a very good friend of mine. Calvin Klein is a friend of mine. These people are friends first and their success is second to me. I’m friends with them because they are interesting and good conversationalists. Famous people, at least in the 70s and 80s, didn’t get to be famous for nothing at all. They were extremely intelligent and interesting people.
Today, I know that’s a different story with people like the Kardashians. As a photographer, you need to be a director and know how to bring out their characters and intellect. You can’t do that if you’re too scared to talk to them. People will be themselves around you if they feel you know what you are doing as a photographer. For me, it’s always been like being a therapist. People will expose themselves to you if they feel like they are in safe hands. Everybody has anxieties, and as a photographer you need to make them feel okay about themselves. So many of my photographs speak to that specific issue: being comfortable with yourself.
HF: I’ve read that you were introduced to Andy Warhol by [author and playwright] Dotson Rader. What were your first impressions of Warhol? Did he have an especially commanding presence?
CM: I, frankly, was really unimpressed. I knew about him, but I had just moved to New York from Southern California and Dotson was showing me around, introducing to me to the likes of Tennessee Williams and so on. So, when I met Andy I found him very uninteresting, all he wanted to do was go to clubs and hang out at Max's Kansas City.
But I invited him to my first exhibition, Step On It, where I put all my photographs on the floor and covered them in plexiglass. He couldn’t go in the end, but he sent [Warhol’s friend and biographer] Bob Colacello and he loved it and invited me to The Factory. There I re-met Andy and - before you know it - we were best friends. I directed the art for his book Exposures and we travelled all over the world together. It was perfect.
Andy Massage, 1983 .
HF: I know you taught Warhol how to use a camera. What camera did you teach him on and what did you think of his photos at first? Did he take to photography naturally?
CM: I totally retaught him. I pretty much [artistically] directed how he took pictures. He really needed to know how to do more than just push the button. He wasn’t a natural photographer and was always jealous of photographers because he loved how quick it was. He always moaned about how long it takes painters to complete a painting.
He was always trying to do a crossover between the two mediums - making photos, paintings and using silk screens. But in the early days he was using images from newspapers and magazines. When he started becoming better at photography, he was able to use his own work. He always talked about how he wished he was like Irving Penn because he could just take the picture and then it was done.
HF: Many people have described Warhol as a mirror to American society - a sort of cultural barometer that reflected back to America its own ideals. This has been why his work has so often been described as shallow, celebrity-obsessed and capitalist. How do you think Warhol would be responding to America in the age of Trump and Covid-19? Do you miss his presence and ability to capture the heart of America in an age of such turmoil and crisis of national identity?
CM: It is hard to miss Andy’s presence because there’s a show going on about him everywhere and anywhere all the time that I’m usually involved in! But I do often see things and think: “Oh you really would have loved this, Andy”. He would have loved social media because he was one of the first “social media people”; he was always taping everything and photographing everything so he really would have loved that.
In terms of Trump and Covid-19, I think Andy would have been really shocked to see what has happened to America. I don’t know how he would have responded artistically. I mean I personally am so shocked right now. If this guy, who is our president right now, starts disregarding votes or doing anything like what he’s talking about, this could be the collapse of America in the way that we understand it. He’s done such damage to our country. Four years - we can recover from that. If he gets re-elected, I don’t see how we will come back from that. Andy would have hated what Donald Trump has done and never would have voted for him. Trump actually wanted Andy to do a portrait of the Trump Tower and I went up there with him. It’s odd because he didn’t leave an impression on me at all. I just thought he was a sleazy real estate guy.
HF: What was it like to photograph Ivana Trump in the 1980s?
CM: She always stood up to Trump. That’s probably why they couldn’t last. She was a very strong woman with a great sense of humour. She’s been very quiet about everything going on now because she knows better than to get on his bad side - she knows he’ll just rip you apart. She’s an interesting woman. It’s always fun to bump into her. I did that cover for New York magazine just after the divorce and she seemed so happy and light, she had a complete lift. She escaped.
HF: You’ve said that while you taught Warhol how to take photographs, Warhol taught you how to be a businessman. What sort of lessons did Warhol teach you about art business? I know his famous quote “making money is art . . . good business is the best art”.
CM: Well, he basically taught me how to balance the books. Also, how to be consistent— to understand what it’s like to be a successful freelancer. He was very structured. He taught me that just because you don’t have a 9 to 5 job you still have to put rules into place for yourself about how you are going to manage your own career and your own work.
Whether you are a musician, an artist or an actor, you have to create a sort of rhythm to your life. That’s what he taught me — that you have to know how to sell your work, and how to organise your finances. I learnt a lot by being around him. It’s always very helpful to work for somebody, to apprentice for somebody.
When I first moved to New York it was easy to apprentice for an artist like Roy Lichtenstein or, Bob Rauschenberg or, Andy Warhol. As the city got more expensive you couldn’t afford to live in Manhattan and get work experience. It’s so important to have a good mentor in the art world. It’s such a shame that it stopped happening in the 90s. It’s so important to be with somebody that can teach you how this world works.
HF: How do you navigate the New York art world? I know Bruce Weber has always praised you for never selling out - how did you achieve this?
CM: It’s consistency, and only doing what you love. And also, doing the same thing for a while, get a niche and get good at it. All these young artists keep trying to do everything — that’s not the way to get known.
Man Ray taught me to always give out the same photograph over and over because it makes that photo famous. It’s important to remember that you as an artist have control over where your career goes. Keith Haring used to do the same thing; he would make ‘Radiant Baby’ pins and give them out on the subway. He kept giving that same imagery out over and over again.
As artists, you have to decide your own fate and not be reliant on the dealers and commercial interests only. You need to be able to define your life and explain to people how you got to be who you are. If you don’t keep your eyes wide open, then it’s the end. You need to pay attention to everything going on, you need to get in touch with society and culture and try to feel it. You need to rely on yourself and not require anyone else to complete you.
HF: You are very self-assured both in person and in your work. Have you always been this way? Or, has it been a journey for you to get to this point and place in your life?
CM: I never grew up with a traditional family, so I always relied on myself to make my own way. I learnt early on that I couldn’t rely on my mom or my dad or anyone else around me when I was growing up. But I learnt to be accountable for my actions.
I don’t know if it’s because I grew up with organised religion, but I had a sense of responsibility to something. Because of that accountability, I had empathy. And with empathy you can understand other people and understand yourself. You have to be able to forgive yourself for your mistakes and move forward. You have to understand that it’s the challenges that make you a better person. If you think that you are done, even at my stage of life — well, sorry, you’re not done. You’re going to have to keep learning things. I’ve had a lot of mentors and friends who’ve helped me out. But I’ve helped myself out. You have got to love yourself. That is the key. You can’t be afraid of falling down, and keep moving on.
Thank you, Christopher.
All Imagery courtesy of the artist.
Holly Fairgrieve,
Creative Director, MADE IN BED