Steve Schapiro. Andy Warhol and Friends

The book is a heavy, generously scaled thing, the sort TASCHEN builds to sit on a table and be reckoned with rather than shelved and lost. Warhol's silver Factory gets a production to match the myth: large reproductions that keep the film grain, wide margins, black-and-white left cool and unwarmed. As an object it treats a scatter of 1960s reportage as archive, which is an argument before a single caption is read.

And the myth is the difficulty. The Factory has been photographed, filmed, memoirized, and merchandised so exhaustively that another volume of Edie and Andy and the foil walls ought to be redundant. Everyone has watched these people be cool, and the silver walls have decorated a thousand dorm rooms since. The genuine risk is that a book like this just reprints a postcard the culture already owns.

What rescues most of it is that Schapiro arrived as a journalist, not a member of the scene. He came to the Factory the way he came to Selma and to Robert Kennedy's campaign, a photojournalist hunting the true frame rather than the flattering one. So his Warhol pictures observe instead of perform. He catches the boredom between happenings, the labor beneath the leisure, the fact that a room built to look effortless actually ran on a great many people working. He photographs the Factory as a place of work, which is the one thing its own publicity always tried to hide.

The specifics carry it. Edie Sedgwick turns up luminous and visibly fragile, Gerard Malanga leans into the silkscreens, the hangers-on arrange themselves around Warhol like filings around a magnet he can hardly be bothered to acknowledge. Schapiro shoots Warhol himself as a still point, watchful and passive, letting the room supply the voltage while he supplies the attention. It is a shrewd reading of how the whole enterprise actually functioned. The camera keeps drifting to the edges of the room, where the real business of the day is quietly getting done.

There is a quiet irony the pictures keep circling. Warhol built a factory of images and surrounded himself with people who performed identity for a living, and Schapiro's ordinary journalistic reflex, watch and wait, cuts straight through the pose to the effort underneath. The insider photographers of that world often mistook the performance for the truth. The outsider caught the assembly line.

Not all of it clears the bar. A good share of the take is simply famous people being photogenic in a famous room, and nearness to Warhol is not, on its own, an idea. Where Schapiro only documents glamour, the frames coast on the reader's fondness for the era, and the archive packaging can flatter thin material.

The collection is strongest where the newsman's eye overrides the glamour and weakest where it gives in. Placed next to his film work, the on-set records of The Godfather and Taxi Driver, the through-line is plain: Schapiro was always better at watching people work than at watching them pose. The Factory, which pretended nobody was working, was a strange and productive place to aim that gift.

The pictures that last are the ones where somebody has forgotten the lens and simply gotten on with the day; the mythology falls away, and what remains is a workshop full of people making something. That is the Warhol worth keeping on the table.