The Andy Warhol Polaroid camera of choice was the Polaroid Big Shot (well, later on the SX70 Polaroid camera too). He took over 100,000 pictures throughout his lifetime.
There’s an exhibit with some of his Polaroids from the 70s and 80s that are on display at the Bastian gallery in London. The portraits feature Michael Basquiat, Jane Fonda, and John Lennon: https://www.bastian-gallery.com/en/exhibitions/andy-warhol-polaroid-pictures/ .
Big Shot
The Big shot combined Warhol’s love of celebrity and mass produced art. The camera allowed him to a crank out uniform, flat, above-the-waist, portrait. Polaroid cameras are ubiquitous thus unassuming to disarm celebrities to take candid and intimate feeling portraits.
Focusing with a rangefinder
My favorite part of using the Andy Warhol go-to Polaroid camera is doing the “Big Shot Shuffle” – moving back and forth to get the shot in focus. How do you know if it’s in focus? You use a viewfinder and in tandem with the rangefinder. The rangefinder is a series of mirrors and tiny focal lens to place a small in off-color rectangle over the image. But they’re not lined up with you aim your camera at the subject (unless you’re about four back and get it on your first try). You need to “shuffle” until both images line up. When they’re lined up you’re in focus and ready to pull that red lever like a slot machine.
The Hunt for Film
It uses discontinued 100 series packfilm (not the white border kind but the type you have to peel part). You if decide to buy this camera be mindful that a 10-pack of peel apart packfilm goes for over $83-$-149 on ebay. Compare that to a regular, new Polaroid Originals pack that goes for around $20 for a 10-pack to use in most Polaroid models. The only company that I found that still makes new packfilm is based in Vienna, Austria. Currently, they only have a black and white three-pack cartridge (to be brutally honesty I couldn’t infer if the site meant three or 30 total pictures) for 49 euros: https://the.supersense.com/collections/packfilm/products/one-instant-packfilm-type-100-pp400-b-w
Try to imagine with he would have done with Polaroid that shoot instant gifs: https://shek.it/