As a notorious clubber, Andy Warhol would often bring multiple cameras, batteries, film and friends to various nightclubs and take continuous, haphazard shots. If someone were to suggest that such activity may not require any specific artistic skill, then Joseph Ketner would say that such critics were probably quoting Warhol.

“He’d say that any photograph was good if it was in focus and was of someone famous,” said Ketner, a Massachusetts-based arts professor and curator who helped organize “Image Machine: Andy Warhol and Photography,” currently exhibited at the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC). “Not everyone could get into Club 54. He was showing a world that most people couldn’t see, and he was doing it as if they were snapshots on a family vacation. His photographs were as ‘pop’ as his pop art.”

Warhol’s famous Pop Art images of soup cans, Coke bottles and Marilyn Monroe are well known, but his photographic output has only been recently available for study and admiration. According to Ketner, this was largely due to estate settlement and the immense amount of litigation that occurred after Warhol’s premature death in 1987. Yet Ketner said this most publicly neglected of Warhol’s artistic mediums was central to his art.

“(Photography) is the principal premise of all of his artistic production,” Ketner said. “What a lot of people overlook is that when he was going to school, there was a book called Vision in Motion, which changed the way art was taught. We know he read it, and a large amount of the book dealt with photography and reproductive (art processes). Nobody could’ve foreseen the huge amount of photography that he produced.”

When the Rose Art Museum of Brandeis University received several Warhol photographic objects from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, they approached Ketner, a former Rose Art director, and asked for a proposal. Ketner said he immediately contacted Raphaela Platow, director chief curator of the CAC.

“We both have a relationship with the Rose Art Museum, and it was natural she wanted it,” Ketner said. “And so the collaboration began.”

Although the exhibit focuses on photography, there will also be a number of silkscreens and paintings, including, naturally, portraits and photographs of his friends from the Factory (Warhol’s famous New York studio), including a young Dennis Hopper. Since Warhol also dabbled in filmmaking, the exhibit will feature a few of his screen tests, as well.

“They’re several minutes long, and the (models) had no direction except to just sit there,” said Molly O’Toole, communications director for the CAC. “(Warhol) believed that after a certain amount of seconds, you couldn’t keep up a facade anymore. You’d have to show your real self.”

O’Tool said she’s thrilled with the response so far, noting that it’s distinctly cross-generational. She also said people walk away from the exhibit with a greater understanding of Warhol as a human being.

“There’s a sense of ‘Warhol the figure’ vs. ‘Warhol the introvert,’” she said. “He was always behind the camera. The photographs are so intimate. It’s not a relationship that is well known to the public. Polaroid discontinued a certain type of film that Warhol liked. They kept making it just for him.”