It Just Happened

The exhibition It Just Happened, by the American photographer and writer Bob Colacello, includes eighty-five photographs, most of them vintage. Letters, magazines and memorabilia are exhibited along with the photographs as complementary documentation.

Colacello was editor of Interview magazine between 1971 and 1983 and Andy Warhol’s right-hand. In It Just Happened, he shares photos from his personal album taken between the late seventies and early eighties, bringing alive an intimate and faithful chronicle of the fascinating social circle around the so-called Pope of Pop.

On one of his many travels with Warhol, Colacello acquired a Minox—a tiny camera said to have been used by spies during the Cold War era. From that moment on, he carried this pocket camera with him to numerous jet-set parties, dinners and weddings, at such emblematic settings as the Factory, Studio 54 and presidential inaugurations at the White House.

Barbara Allen, Thomas Ammann, Joseph Beuys, Peter Beard, Larry Rivers, Bianca Jagger, Robert Mapplethorpe, George Hamilton, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Cher, Truman Capote, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mick Jagger, Paul Morrissey, Paloma Picasso, Audrey Hepburn, Robert Wilson, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, Jean Pigozzi, Lord George Weidenfeld, Jamie Wyeth and Raquel Welch are just a few of the icons that make up the select cast in Colacello’s photographs. This body of work captures like no other both the privacy of places where access to paparazzi was restricted and the freedom of the time.

These ‘stolen’ snapshots, with unexpected frames and overexposed lighting, demonstrate Colacello’s rebellious spirit and impudence against photography’s formal conventions of symmetry, exposure and balance. It is in this subversive attitude and irrepressible rhythm where the photographer’s contribution lies: the construction of a new aesthetic identity within the photojournalistic genre of the seventies and eighties.

On the occasion of the exhibition, Ivorypress is publishing a book with the same title. Conceived as a photographic album, the publication presents Colacello’s photographs chronologically, accompanied by captions handwritten by the photographer, explaining and contextualising the images. This book is part of the Ivorypress Archives series, which aims to make unpublished and long-lost material available to the general public.

The exhibition and book launched on 19 November with an online conversation between Elena Foster and Bob Colacello and a virtual tour through the exhibition. The show is open by appointment only and, depending on how the COVID-19 situation evolves, a closing event with the presence of the artist will be held at Ivorypress Madrid in the following months.