Karen Bystedt

Karen Bystedt is an American visual artist and photographer born in Israel and grew up in London, San Francisco and Los Angeles. She currently resides in Downtown Los Angeles. Bystedt is best known for a series of photographs she took of Andy Warhol in 1982 and for her collaborations with other artists, such as Chris Brown, using these images as the base for the designs. In 2014, LA Weekly included one of Bystedt's murals in their list of the top ten murals in the city.

"The Lost Warhols" - In 1982, Bystedt was a student at New York University working on a photography book of male models. Inspired by the modeling Warhol had done the year prior for Barney's in GQ Magazine, Bystedt wanted to include him in her project.[4][5] Although Warhol rarely participated in shoots where he was a model rather than the artist, he agreed to let Bystedt photograph him at his iconic studio, The Factory. For the sitting, Warhol dressed himself in a tweed Perry Ellis sports coat, wore a neatly combed white toupee, rather than his signature "fright wig," and held a miniature American flag. Bystedt took 36 frames of Warhol and published two of them in her book of male models, Not Just Another Pretty Face. The negatives were then placed in storage and subsequently lost until 2011 when Bystedt rediscovered ten of them. Since then, Bystedt has exhibited "The Lost Warhols" in group and solo exhibitions internationally, including Los Angeles, New York and Portugal.

Bystedt has published four books combining interviews with her photography: Not Just Another Pretty Face (1983), The New Breed (1988), They Dared to Dream (2009) and Before They Were Famous (1992), a collection of intimate photographs and candid interviews of actors taken before their rise to fame.

View a selection of Karen’s prints below ↓