It feels like everything has been said about Andy Warhol. Each year seems to produce another biography, another collaboration, another exhibition. Not that Warhol is turning in his grave — he would have loved the undying attention. But to say something fresh about him has become a challenge, one that Deborah Bell was more than happy to undertake with her new exhibition, Andy Warhol’s Street Diary.
    “This show is all about Andy’s eye for composition, light, for formal arrangements, for detail,” Bell said at the opening reception. “I always knew that Andy was interested in photography, but it was usually as a means to an end. These were the end product.”
    All the prints in the exhibition are unique, although their variants have been used for Warhol’s stitched photographs. The twenty-five black and white pictures depict him as a flaneur who loved wandering the streets of New York documenting its minutia. The photos carefully juxtapose the grand against the mundane, and this coexistence of diamonds and trash is what gives New York its character. Here is an Yves-Saint Laurent shop window, and here is the flea market, the garbage can and the Rockefeller center Christmas tree. In the catalogue that accompanies the exhibit Jonas Mekas rightly notes that Warhol did not pass judgment on his subjects, and the photos in the exhibition speak to that.

Andy Warhol’s Street Diary, Photographs 1981-1986 at Deborah Bell Photographs, 511 West 25th St., Suite 703, New York.