Joe Kennedy 1986

This is Andy Warhol's Polaroid of Joe Kennedy. It’s got that instant quality, like a moment grabbed right out of time. I love how Warhol uses the camera as a way of painting. The flatness of the image, the way the colors pop – it's all about surface and immediacy. Look at Kennedy’s hair, that mass of tight curls; Warhol captures every single detail, but then flattens it all out into this graphic pattern. It's like he's turning the real Joe Kennedy into a Warholian icon, playing with ideas of celebrity and representation. The colours are so vital, yet so contained, there’s a real tension. It reminds me a little of Alex Katz’s portraits, in the way both artists manage to distill a personality down to a few key elements. But Warhol brings that Pop Art sensibility, that love of the commercial and the mass-produced. It's not just a portrait; it's an idea about how we see and consume images of people.