Andy Warhol created this self portrait painting in 1979. Known for his fascination for fame and all things popular, Warhol was especially concerned with image and the visual, surface-level nature of things. Naturally, his inclination to represent the world around him translated to his own image, too.

Spanning his entire life and work, we see Warhol’s relationship with selfhood ebb and flow in a thread that runs through all of his experiments in self-portraiture. These works become extra special: Warhol, celebrated for his perpetual capturing of the external world, turns the camera back on himself. It’s possible that, for Warhol, these images represent an attempt to control our perceptions of him. As someone who at once strived to be in the limelight, yet determinedly maintained an unwilling, cryptic demeanor in the public eye, Warhol seems to use works like this Self-Portrait from 1979 to tune the world’s imagination of him.