Andy Warhol brought his camera with him everywhere he went — first a Polaroid, and then his treasured 35-millimeter compact Minox. “Having a few rolls of film to develop gives me a good reason to get up in the morning,” he said. In his lifetime, he produced nearly 130,000 images with the Minox alone, only 17 percent of which had been printed at the time of his death. Like other major artists of the 1960s, including Warhol’s contemporary, Robert Rauschenberg, he was creating a new visual language from a photographic vocabulary, long before the art world understood the significance of the medium. Warhol’s preoccupation with photography is a meaty subject for a show.

That show is “Andy Warhol Photography: 1967-1987,” which highlights the artist’s photographic output with a range of gelatin silver prints that record the most ordinary moments in his random daily activities, as well as his Polaroid portraits, still-lifes and nudes, filling both of Jack Shainman gallery’s Chelsea locations. Many of the 193 pieces have rarely, if ever, been seen before. The handsomely installed exhibition begins with a sequence of framed Polaroid images of objects: a bunch of bananas; eggs in an egg carton; knives; a mélange of high heels. While these images echo product shots in retail catalogs, they are as refined in detail, composition and color as still-life miniatures.

In the 1970s, Warhol carried his Polaroid camera around as “his date,” as he called it, a tool that enabled him to engage his subjects while imposing distance at the same time. Among the dozen or so Polaroid portraits in the show, each distinct in gesture, color, and lighting, are those of Tina Chow, Joe Dallesandro, Bianca Jagger, Robert Mapplethorpe, Rudolf Nureyev and Lee Radziwill. “The Polaroid gets rid of everybody’s wrinkles, sort of simplifies the face,” Warhol noted. “I try to make everybody look great.” Nine Polaroid self-portraits of this ultimate icon of pop inscrutability are included, too, though Warhol is less kind — or more honest — in the pictures of himself.