ALBANY — If you ever stopped by Andy Warhol’s Factory, you could be pretty sure he would want you to pose for his camera.

“I can hear him say something like ‘make a face’ or ‘move around’ or ‘take off your shirt,’ ” said Roberta Bernstein, the pop icon’s former assistant and an art historian.

Or, he might ask someone to drop their drawers.

“That was typical of Andy. He had a naughty side to his personality. He would never force anyone to do anything, but he could sense what he could get someone to do,” said Bernstein.

Yet it wasn’t the naughty side that his camera was nourishing. His camera fed his obsessive need to track every moment of his life. In 1966, Bernstein worked with Warhol at his East 47th Street Factory. At that point, he used a tape recorder to document his life.

“When I came in and said ‘hello,’ he’d say ‘wait a minute, let me get my tape recorder.’ Then he would record our conversation.”

Bizarre and banal

Later, in his Union Square Factory, he was armed with a camera to capture the bizarre and the banal; the stars and the anonymous. In Polaroid, he snapped frames of head-and-shoulders and bare torso. With his 35-millimeter, he turned his roving lens on car wrecks, race riots, celebrity parties and hotel toilets.

“A picture means I know where I am every minute. That’s why I take pictures. It’s a visual diary,” Warhol said.

It’s not surprising, then, that he amassed a collection of 28,000 images. More than 150 of them are now on display at the University Art Museum. The 102 Polaroids and 51 gelatin silver prints, which have never been displayed before, were donated to the university by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. (The foundation also donated Warhol images to several other universities, including Union and Skidmore colleges.)

Supplementing the photo exhibition is a Warhol video, “Outer and Inner Space,” which shows his favored model, Edie Sedgwick, talking to a videotaped image of herself. University Art Museum Associate Director and Curator Corinna Ripps Schaming called the video “riveting.”

“The first time I saw it,” said Schaming, “I couldn’t tear myself away. It resonated like few videos do.”

Oddly, Warhol’s rather pedestrian Polaroids also resonate. It’s not that they reveal anything special about the subjects. The pictures are taken against a plain backdrop. The expressions of the models, from James Wyeth to Kareem Abdul Jabbar, are innocuous. Schaming described the look “a non-look.”

What makes them interesting is this: They were captured in multiples with subtle differences. Collectively, on the walls of the museum, the faces speak of universal humanity.

Yet that was not Warhol’s intent. Rather, Schaming said, he was consumed with archiving his day-to-day encounters.

Staving off death

“This need to document the world around him in photographs was like staving off death. No matter how mundane, there is a certain pathos. He is capturing a moment that happened. And once it is done, it will never happen again. It was a lasting remnant.”

Warhol was also seeking inspiration for his art.

“Eventually the portraits would end in his silkscreen paintings,” said Schaming. “He liked repetition. What he used, that decision came out in his painting.”

Bernstein, who is a professor emeritus of art history at the University at Albany, said Warhol worked in series to drive himself deeper into his subject. For example, with the repetitive Brillo boxes, soup cans and Marilyn Monroe images, he was elaborating on a culture based on mass marketing.

“When he was asked why he painted Campbell soup cans, he said because he ate it every day for lunch. He was making a statement about not being in touch with the source of our food,” said Bernstein, who will give a talk on Warhol on Tuesday, Dec. 2, at the museum. “He came from a background of poverty in Pittsburgh. His parents were impoverished immigrants. He grew up watching movie stars and celebrities. He was invested in the American dream. He made it the subject matter of his art. He embraced that world and also was critiquing it. His art was a double-edged sword.”

Interspersed among the Polaroids, breaking up their monotony, are his 51 gelatin silver prints. These take a glimpse of the world outside Warhol’s Factory. Photos show his glamorous circle of friends, including Mel Gibson, Phyllis George and members of the band Duran Duran, at parties. He also took a behind-the-scenes look at fashion shows with the stylish Diana Vreeland. He also photographed the everyday, such as a table cluttered with a sculpted head, a vase and a lamp. There are also anonymous images of the city — a street with pedestrians passing; or the country — a lone house and car buried in snow.

“He had an incredible eye for the world around him,” said Schaming, which, she added, was at odds with his persona as “a super cool, dispassionate person.”

Accompanying video

Once the still images have been absorbed, museum visitors can enter the Nancy Hyatt Liddle Gallery to view the continuously running video/film of Sedgwick, who died in 1971. From 1965, “Outer and Inner Space” is a 33-minute psychological portrait of the model that, through juxtaposition, reveals her private and public self.

“It’s intense and neurotic,” said Schaming. “You can see all sorts of aspects of her personality.”

A companion exhibition, “Look This Way: Photographic Portraits from the University Art Collection,” hangs in the downstairs gallery. Featuring 34 black-and-white portraits taken by such photographers as Edward Steichen, Helmut Newton and Larry Fink, the exhibition complements Warhol’s eye and subject matter. Among the portraits of celebrities is Newton’s of a lounging Warhol.

Schaming said the university’s photographs are “a nice match” with the Warhol images.

“Warhol was enormously prolific,” said Schaming. “Having these works in our collection lays a foundation for future scholars and students who want to research his process.”