Bob Colacello’s Out

Out documents an era at once so close and so far away: the wild, glamorous, disco-and-drugs decade between the end of the Vietnam war and the advent of AIDS, when, in certain parts of Manhattan, every night was party night. As the editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview from 1971 to 1983, Bob Colacello was perfectly placed to record this life of art openings, movie premieres, cocktail parties, dinner parties, charity balls and after-hours clubs he wrote about the best of them in a monthly column called Out. In 1975, Swiss art dealer Thomas Ammann gave Colacello one of the first miniature 35mm cameras, a black plastic Minox small enough to hide in his jacket pocket, and Colacello began snapping photographs too. Sneaking a shot of Henry Kissinger holding forth at a dinner party, or Bianca Jagger letting loose at Studio 54, Colacello was in the middle of the action, an accidental photographer more akin to a secret agent than any typical paparazzo. With their skewed angles, multilayered compositions, and moody lighting, his images have an immediacy and grit not often found in the work of professional party photographers. And what subjects! Diana Vreeland, Calvin Klein, Jack Nicholson, Richard Gere, Cher, Raquel Welch, Mick Jagger, Diane von Furstenberg, Barry Diller, Valentino, Yves Saint Laurent, Nan Kempner, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein and always Warhol himself. Because space in Interview was limited, only a handful of Colacello’s pictures were published each month. Most of those collected in Out have never been seen before.