WarholMania review – lifting the lid on the ultimate self-promoter

One was a drug-addled, gay ex-lover of the artist, the other a staunchly straight professional with a vision: two men (both called William) became the most important chroniclers of Andy Warhol’s early period in New York, one of the most mythologised periods of art history. They later vanished from Warhol’s Factory and his life – and their negatives were almost lost. But in a kitsch one-bed flat in a luxury complex on the Strand in London, their legacy is revived in an intimate exhibition, WarholMania.

It is the first time the photographs of Billy Name and William John Kennedy have been shown together, though they photographed Warhol at the Factory between 1964 and 1970. The staging of WarholMania in this small, plush residential flat is disorienting at first – footsteps disappear into thick carpets, natural light is shut out with chintzy silver curtains and shiny silver balloons float ominously overhead – a nod to the silver foil that covered the Factory. It’s a delicious way to recreate the atmosphere conjured in the photographs, of a hard-to-access place where anything could happen.

Billy Name was working as a waiter at Serendipity 3 when he first encountered Warhol. Warhol later went to a haircutting party at Name’s apartment on the Lower East Side, and was impressed by his floor to ceiling silver decor – he invited Name to give his new loft studio at 231 East 47th Street a similar makeover. Once the “silverisation” was complete in 1964, Name moved into a tiny broom cupboard on the premises.

After a brief love affair, the two became close friends. Warhol handed Name his Pentax Honeywell camera and anointed him archivist of the Factory. Over the next six years, Name fastidiously recorded what he saw. A very slim selection of these pictures appears at the flat on the Strand (rebranded as the Warhol Kennedy Residence), grainy silkscreen prints Name made from a cache of negatives he recouped after Warhol’s death in 1987.

The rough style of the prints preserves the energy of the Factory – and gives the pictures a unique attitude. The images themselves are fairly bland, given the unprecedented access Name had. There are behind-the-scenes documents of the screenprinting process, beautifully languid portraits of Warhol muses Nico and Susan Bottomly; installations in the making and marquees announcing screenings of My Hustler and Chelsea Girls. As a glimpse into the motion and buzz of New York’s pop art scene in the 1960s, they reveal little and much less of Name’s relationship with Warhol. The pictures have a quiet acquiescence, as if Name has disappeared along with his negatives. When he walked out of the Factory in 1970, fed up with amphetamine abuse and the sybaritic lifestyle, he never saw Warhol again.

Warhol needed photographers to cement his status as an icon. Yet as a subject, he gives little away. William John Kennedy was introduced to Warhol by the artist Robert Indiana. At their first shoot, which took place at the Factory in 1964, Kennedy wanted to shoot Warhol with his artworks. Warhol picked up an acetate silkscreen of Marilyn Monroe from a pile on the floor and held it up. As a metaphor it is striking and complex, Monroe’s blown-up, transparent face superimposed on Warhol’s figure. Still, there are too many versions of the same image – all only slightly different – spread around the flat.

Kennedy became friends with Warhol, but never went in for the drug-fuelled hedonism of the Factory. His photographs are tautly constructed and more formal than Name’s. He managed to persuade Warhol to wear his self-portrait canvases as a sandwich board, shooting the artist from above – so that in the final image, we look down on Warhol, touting his own face, the ultimate self-promoter.

Sprawled across a faux fur blanket in the bedroom are pictures Kennedy took of Warhol and his collaborator Taylor Mead with Warhol’s Flower paintings in a field of black-eyed Susans in Queens. It’s these pictures that feel the most fun – even Warhol is smiling and in one photograph, removes his glasses. Kennedy captured other important moments, too: Warhol snipping at reels, editing a film; Warhol standing at a payphone, in the exact spot where only a few years later, in 1968, he was shot by Valerie Solanas. Yet somehow, Kennedy too abandoned his negatives – they were shut away in a cupboard for more than 50 years, until Kennedy and his wife rediscovered them while relocating.

WarholMania is not a show of photographs about Warhol, who remains distant and unknowable, a myth not a man. It is about how we look at Warhol, and how photography preserves legacies and perpetuates legends. Though showing an interesting contrast in atmosphere, the juxtaposed perspectives of these two little-known American photographers are tame and mostly lacking emotion. What they thought of Warhol or the Factory remains as mysterious as Warhol. But maybe that’s the whole point. It’s as if Warhol is still present – and still controlling the room.

• WarholMania is at The Warhol Kennedy Residence, London until 31 October