(upbeat music) - My name is John Hustad, and I'm a lifelong resident of Minnesota, and my whole life has really been involved in imagery, photography, and communications.

Those precious photos that you talk about, decisive moments in people's lives where something was captured that had a longevity to it and persevered, and it was about storytelling, and it was about capturing these decisive moments.

Locksley, Shea.

This is George Shea, this is Gordon Locksley.

They were gay business people here in the Twin Cities that were really kind of larger than life.

They owned, or at least started, one of the gay bars, that is no longer in existence.

They had a rather chic-chic hair salon on Nicollet Avenue called the Red Carpet, and that's where they started selling Warhol artwork.

They had commissioned Warhol to do their portrait, and they also owned a mansion up on Mount Curve, and that's where they set up their gallery, and that's where the party for Andy Warhol was, so that was in September of 1975.

You know, it was like New York had come to Minneapolis.

(upbeat music) I got to the party, and, I don't know, I felt kind of out of place.

It was quite a menagerie of people.

Well-heeled gentlemen, you know, women with too much makeup, some very outlandish clothing for the time, and then a lot of eye candy.

(laughs) (upbeat music) I was looking around and here was Andy Warhol sitting all by himself just kind of off in the corner, and I just walked over to him and I said, "Would it be okay if I took some pictures?"

I felt like I had his permission, and with a 24-millimeter lens, a wide-angle lens, you have to get very close to people in order to sort of fill the frame, so like I was really in his face the rest of the evening taking pictures of him.

(upbeat music) You know, they almost didn't exist because at some point after the images were taken, the negatives disappeared, and all I had left was a roll of proofs, which really were in quite dreadful condition.

I did high-res scans of these proofs and spent hours and hours and hours in Photoshop digitally restoring them.

Then I produced an unabridged folio of these prints.

They've never been published.

They've never been seen by the world.

They're sort of making their debut 40 years later.

(upbeat music)