Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) occupies an unusual place in photography.[1] He attracted controversy for his male nudes and his depiction of New York’s leather bar and S&M subculture. But he also took a formal approach to posing his nude models, arranging them like classical sculptures, and some of his best-known work consists of conventional portraits and still life flower images.
There are continuing arguments about Mapplethorpe’s place in the history of photography. Some say he created an exceptional body of work, which brought attention to gay culture and broadened the range of acceptable subject matter for later photographers.[2] Others say he was a merely competent New York studio photographer, who rose to fame due to his controversy and celebrity portraits, rather than any special quality of his art.[3]
The truth (for me) lies in the middle. I find some of Mapplethorpe’s portrait, still life, and out-of-studio images compelling; I appreciate his desire for beauty, order, and careful arrangement. But his portraits have a staged feel to them that doesn’t always hold my interest, I am neutral at best on his S&M images, and the way he posed his black models makes me uncomfortable—all the more so after reading some of the critical writing on him.
Background
Raised in a religious Roman Catholic family, Mapplethorpe felt alienated from his parents and five siblings.[4] He left his home in Queens early, studied fine art at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn but never finished his degree, and ended up in the late 1960s broke and living in the Chelsea Hotel with his then-girlfriend Patti Smith.[5] Mapplethorpe and Smith had a close relationship at the beginning of their respective careers, and again near the end of his life.[6] Some of Mapplethorpe’s best portraits are of her, including the androgynous image that served as the cover of her 1975 debut album, Horses.[7]
Mapplethorpe met his patron and sometimes lover, art collector Sam Wagstaff (1921-1987) in 1972. Wagstaff’s financial support over the next 15 years allowed Mapplethorpe to pursue his own interests.[8] Wagstaff also played an important role in encouraging Mapplethorpe and promoting him to others, as well as being a strong advocate in the arts community for photography as fine art.[9] Apart from Smith and Wagstaff, Mapplethorpe had a string of short-term relationships with his models, notably Milton Moore and Jack Walls; his behaviour toward these men was patronizing and tinged with racism.[10]
Mapplethorpe’s early interest was in collage and physical art, such as the frames he created for some of his photographs.[11] To some extent, he chose photography because it was available to him and served his purposes, rather than out of any love for it. “I never liked photography,” he said. “I like the object. I like the photographs when you hold them in your hand.”[12] He started by shooting Polaroids, and moved to a Hasselblad medium format camera when he could get one. While he had talent behind the camera, he had no interest in printing his photographs, a task which he delegated to assistants, notably Tom Baril.[13]
Mapplethorpe is often called a formalist photographer.[14] Formalism is an approach that focuses on the visual elements of art, including texture, shape, line, and arrangement of form, without reference to historical context or narrative.[15] I see formalism reflected in Mapplethorpe’s images in three main ways. First, he paid great attention to posing his models, including the arrangement of their heads, hands and limbs. Second, he composed his images with an emphasis on shape and contrast, often arranging his models in geometric shapes against contrasting backgrounds. Third, he considered the image and the way it looked more important than the subject matter itself. As he famously said: “I don’t think that there’s that much difference between a photograph of a fist up someone’s ass and a photograph of carnations in a bowl.”[16]
Key Categories of Photography
Much of Mapplethorpe’s 1980s photography consists of male nudes, carefully arranged, often with their genitals on display.[17] These images are among his best—stark, with simple backgrounds, strong contrast and excellent use of form.[18] But critics have described these images as problematic for depicting black men as sex objects, in submissive or demeaning poses.[19] As one example, critics note how Man in Polyester Suit—an image of Milton Moore’s torso with his penis hanging out of the fly—strips the model of his individuality.[20] Others have pointed to Mapplethorpe’s racist treatment of his black lovers and models.[21]
Mapplethorpe’s images of New York’s leather bar and S&M subculture from the late 1970s “are among the artist’s least theatrical photographs.”[22] In one of the tamer images, he posed two men in leather gear and chains in an ordinary (if somewhat stylish) living room; other images are more challenging, featuring fisting and genital abuse.[23] Mapplethorpe argued that he was an active participant in the subculture, and so was merely photographing what he knew. Despite the documentary feel to many of these images, one critic notes that they “depict not sex acts per se but re-enactments of sex acts, theatrically lit against spare backdrops” in Mapplethorpe’s studio.[24]
Apart from his nude and explicit images, Mapplethorpe produced a significant body of conventional portraits. These feature celebrities from the music and art worlds, including Philip Glass, Andy Warhol, and Grace Jones.[25] The best of these create a sense of drama in the way the subject is posed or interacts with the environment. Thus, he photographed singer Deborah Harry leaning backward in rumpled white clothing with narrowed eyes, writer William Burroughs staring down at his clasped hands, and singer Iggy Pop with one hand holding a cigarette close to the camera.[26] Mapplethorpe also produced a series of self-portraits, which have attracted critical interest for their themes of gender and self-identity.[27] In these self-portraits he adopts a variety of different styles: dressed in women’s clothes with makeup, wearing devil’s horns, in a leather jacket holding a switchblade, and, in the year before his death, seated with his cane (topped by a small skull) in the foreground.[28]
Mapplethorpe’s tendency toward careful arrangement reached its zenith in his still life photography. Many of his still life images feature tulips, orchids, roses or other flowers, often leaning dramatically out of their vases.[29] In one of his relatively rare colour images, two poppy stems entwine: one stem goes upward to an unopen bud while the other stem slants downward to where the flower rests, face down.[30] He also photographed classical sculptures, including a bust of Apollo and an Italian devil, and Frederic Leighton’s full-length statue The Sluggard.[31] Unsurprisingly, he generally lit and photographed the classical statues in the same way he lit and photographed his statuesque human models.
Mapplethorpe did most of his later photography in studio, where he could pose and light his subjects the way he wanted. However, he did step outside the studio for occasional photographs; the few images that I have seen in this category are excellent—striking, unusual, inventive. These include images of an apartment exterior with repeating rectangular windows, a television chained to a wall mount, and a building interior in New Orleans consisting mostly of white painted walls.[32] In my eyes, these images are among his most interesting, and make me wonder what would have happened if he had lived past his early 40s and turned some of his attention to architectural or landscape photography.
Notes on Three Images
In Patti Smith (1976), Smith sits naked on the floor of a room with white walls and a dark floor, with her knees against her chest and her arms extended to hold the pipes of a radiator.[33] Her body is centred in the foreground of the square image. The radiator pipes provide lines that lead into the room and then frame her face, which is turned to the viewer. Her face has a neutral expression and is strongly lit by the widow above the radiator, while her calves are lost in dark shadow. The image is finely balanced but has tension because of the shape of Smith’s outstretched arms; it is remarkable for its geometric arrangement of the key shapes (the lines of the radiator and the oval shape of Smith’s body), and also for the sense of defiance that Smith seems to project. This is an inventive image, which deserves to be remembered after Mapplethorpe’s more generic portraits are forgotten.[34]
American Flag (1977) shows a battered and dramatically back-lit flag, aligned to the upper left-hand corner of the square image.[35] The flag is unravelling on its right-hand side, with tears forming between the dark and light stripes. The sun is located behind the dark rectangle with white stars in the upper left-hand side of the flag: however, due to the bright sunlight and the way the stars were fixed to this part of the flag, the usually dark rectangle has become a light area, overlaid by dark stars, with a burned out highlight in the centre. The strong backlighting shows a network of fine wrinkles in the white stripes, giving the flag a textured look. Overall, the image is both dynamic and static at the same time; it depicts the geometry of the flag’s design and the many fine details that make up this particular flag.
In Self Portrait (1983), Mapplethorpe poses dressed in a leather jacket, dress shirt and bow-tie, cradling a machine gun in his arms.[36] His hair is finely coiffed, with one lock falling over his left eyebrow; his expression is serious and alert. The machine gun has a sheen to it and Mapplethorpe holds it so that the muzzle extends beyond his right shoulder. The highlights on the machine gun and its position in the image ensure that the viewer’s gaze is drawn repeatedly to it. Mapplethorpe stands below an inverted five-pointed star, his head framed by a pentagon within the star. The image summarizes many of the strengths and weaknesses in Mapplethorpe’s portraits. It is well-designed, has a fine sense of geometry and initially draws the viewer in. But it is also shallow and gimmicky, like a pulp comic book that seems impressive at the time but quickly fades from memory. At best, one is left guessing what Mapplethorpe intended by this odd collection of symbols—with the answer, I suspect, “probably nothing”.[37]
Mapplethorpe as Transgressor
The lasting appeal of Mapplethorpe’s photography comes from its transgressive quality. You never know what you will see when you flip the page of a book of his photographs – it could be a bowl of carnations, or someone being fisted.[38] Admirers of Mapplethorpe sometimes claim, half-seriously, that he never intended to shock.[39] But I don’t buy this; in rebuttal I would simply point to his images and his interview quotations. Mapplethorpe, at least for most of his career, reveled in his role as agent provocateur. Why else would he photograph a penis, bound in string, threatened by a small devil figurine?[40] Who else would say “Beauty and the devil are the same thing”?[41]
Posted: December 2021; endnotes updated June 2022.
For Further Information
Online Resources
The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, which was established by the artist before his death and funded by his considerable estate, has a website at http://www.mapplethorpe.org/ with a good selection of his photographs and a short artist’s biography.
The Tate gallery has a good essay on Mapplethorpe and his key images and themes, “The Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe”, available at https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/robert-mapplethorpe-11413/photographs-robert-mapplethorpe.
The National Galleries Scotland has a good collection of about sixty of Mapplethorpe’s photographs, with short write ups, at https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/artists/robert-mapplethorpe.
Books
Patricia Morrisroe, Mapplethorpe: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1995). Although authorized by Mapplethorpe, this official biography has been criticized for taking an unsympathetic view of his life and work.
Patti Smith, Just Kids (New York: Harper Collins, 2010). This memoir of Patti Smith’s early relationship with Mapplethorpe won a National Book Award for non-fiction.
Endnotes
| ↑1 | Given the overwhelming amount of popular and critical writing on Mapplethorpe, it is debatable whether the world needs one more summary article about him. But even at its most glib his photography is interesting to me, and my purpose here is essentially a selfish one (to help me sort out my own thoughts on him). I found my assessment of Mapplethorpe shifting back and forth as I read more about him and reviewed more of his images. |
|---|---|
| ↑2 | See, for example, Richard Flood’s interview of Catherine Opie, in Richard Flood, editor, Mapplethorpe X7 (Kempen, Germany: teNeues Publishing, 2010), 93-96 at 94, where Opie says: “One of the reasons why…he’s so important, is because he created his own moment in terms of that period of time. It was the first time, basically, that any of us had ever seen queer work that was beautifully, highly aestheticized. That was very different than the kind of pleasure magazines that were going on at the time, in that period, or even when you think of Tom of Finland. It created a classical discourse to his life.” See also Holland Cotter, “Why Mapplethorpe Still Matters,” New York Times (March 31, 2016) available at https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/01/arts/design/why-mapplethorpe-still-matters.html. Cotter notes: “[Mapplethorpe] made news when a print of ‘Man in a Polyester Suit’ sold for close to a half-million dollars at Sotheby’s last year. But in many outlets, reports of the sale were published without a photo. This refusal to show his art—this exercise of discretion, let’s call it—points to the most interesting thing about it, and about him: It reasserts his status as a radical. This is a crucial status for a gay artist to maintain at a time when ‘gay’ is being domesticated and normalized, its potential for political resistance smoothed away.” |
| ↑3 | See Grace Glueck, “Fallen Angel,” New York Times (June 25, 1995), available at https://www.nytimes.com/1995/06/25/books/fallen-angel.html. Glueck writes: “As a photographer Mapplethorpe was, in my opinion, by no means a first-class talent. His work was too derivative of earlier photographers—[George Platt] Lynes, Edward Weston, Diane Arbus and Paul Outerbridge, to name a few. He owed his success in large part to his own and others’ promotional efforts and to the patronage of chic followers captivated by the decadent image he presented as a fallen angel.” See also Arthur Lubow, “Has Robert Mapplethorpe’s Moment Passed?” New York Times (July 25, 2019), available at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/arts/design/robert-mapplethorpe-guggenheim.html. Lublow writes: “In 2003, [John] Szarkowski [director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art] told me that Mapplethorpe ‘was a pretty good commercial photographer who photographed things people weren’t accustomed to seeing in mixed company.’ … Put a little more generously, Mapplethorpe had the canniness and the guts to exhibit pictures that framed his sexual obsessions with a formal elegance that allowed them unprecedented entree into galleries and museums.” |
| ↑4 | Mapplethorpe’s background in Catholicism played a key role in his thinking about art. As Kevin Moore writes, Mapplethorpe’s alter egos, captured in his self-portraits, “reveal a committed exploration of Catholic themes familiar throughout art history: the debasement and transcendence of the flesh; transgression, punishment and confession; agony and ecstasy.” (See Kevin Moore, “Whipping up a storm: how Robert Mapplethorpe shocked America,” The Guardian (November 17, 2015), available at https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/nov/17/robert-mapplethorpe-the-perfect-moment-25-years-later.) While Mapplethorpe was alienated from his siblings, he later reconciled with his younger brother Edward, who served as Mapplethorpe’s assistant starting in 1982 and became a photographer in his own right. |
| ↑5 | For Mapplethorpe’s time as a student at the Pratt Institute, see Patricia Morrisroe, Mapplethorpe: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1995), Chapters 2 and 3. |
| ↑6 | Morrisroe, Mapplethorpe, supra note 5, Chapters 4, 5 and 6. See also Patti Smith’s memoir, Just Kids (New York: Harper Collins, 2010). Smith presents a positive view of the young Mapplethorpe, which contrasts sharply with the difficult, self-centred man described by Morrisroe in her biography. |
| ↑7 | Much has been written about Mapplethorpe’s famous cover image and Smith’s famous Horses album; they have become the garage rock equivalent of Jay Maisel’s cover image and Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue album. For two unusual commentaries on the Horses image, see: “What’s in a Picture: Robert Mapplethorpe’s Portrait of Patti Smith for Horses” in Camile Paglia, Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism (New York: Pantheon, 2017), available at https://lithub.com/camille-paglia-on-the-iconic-cover-of-patti-smiths-horses/, and Elizabeth Wolfson, “Matching Bodies, Matching Souls: (re)constructing gender in Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe’s Horses photograph,” Shift: Queen’s Journal of Visual & Material Culture (2009), no. 2, 1-23. |
| ↑8 | To name three examples, Wagstaff gave Mapplethorpe $500,000 so that Mapplethorpe could purchase his studio at 24 Bond Street in 1972, a Hasselblad 500 medium format camera in 1975, and the majority of his estate—worth several million dollars—when Wagstaff died in 1987. |
| ↑9 | Wagstaff played a critical role in Mapplethorpe’s success as a photographer. As Frances Terpak and Michelle Brunnick write: “Besides financial backing, Wagstaff had much to offer with his solid art-historical training, knowledge of contemporary art, contacts in the art world, and genuine affection for and desire to promote this emerging artist. Moreover, the timing was impeccable with Wagstaff on the verge of discovering the largely uncharted territory of the history of photography and its many ‘unknown’ works. Possessing a voracious appetite for the visual, he amassed a broad, heterogeneous collection of mainly nineteenth and early twentieth-century photographs while championing the medium through exhibitions and lectures. For Wagstaff, it was a fertile period for studying and building his collection and for learning with Mapplethorpe about photography.” (See Frances Terpak and Michelle Brunnick, “Instant Attraction” in Frances Terpak, Michelle Brunnick, Patti Smith, Jonathan Weinberg, and Robert Mapplethorpe, Robert Mapplethorpe: The Archive (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2016), 75-99 at 80.) Wagstaff was an important figure in the arts community and has attracted posthumous attention for his relationship with Mapplethorpe: see James Crump’s documentary Black White + Gray: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff + Robert Mapplethorpe, released in 2007, and Philip Gefter’s Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe: A Biography (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2015). |
| ↑10 | Morrisroe, Mapplethorpe, supra note 5, Chapters 17 and 18. |
| ↑11 | Early examples of his collage and physical art include Leatherman #1 (1970), which combines a photograph from a gay men’s magazine, black netting, a metal star, and wallpaper, or his untitled work from 1970, which consists of blue underwear stretched tightly over a frame. As an example of unusual framing, Michael (1974) features a wood frame with one part that stretches beyond the rectangular form of the photograph, and then abruptly turns to point back at it. |
| ↑12 | As quoted in Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1995) at 38. The quotation comes from a 1987 interview, but I have been unable to locate interview itself. |
| ↑13 | See Morrisroe, Mapplethorpe, supra note 5, Chapter 19. Baril was a 27-year-old student at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan when he started printing for Mapplethorpe in 1979; he was responsible for Mapplethorpe’s impressive black and white images of the 1980s. Morrisroe notes that Baril detested Mapplethorpe, but produced prints “universally lauded” for their quality. |
| ↑14 | In the exhibition catalog for Mapplethorpe’s Flowers, a 1983 show in Japan, Sam Wagstaff wrote: “[These pictures] combine contemporary ideas of freedom about nudity, sexuality, and pleasure of seeing with a formal almost ritualistic posture. This willful geometry seems to me to be a formalism brought up to date from the great formalisms of the 19th century and especially Nadar’s.” (As quoted in Terpak and Brunnick, “Instant Attraction,” supra note 9, at 80.) See also Richard Flood’s interviews of Vik Muniz, Catherine Opie, and Robert Wilson in Flood, Mapplethorpe X7, supra note 2, 51-53 at 51, 93-96 at 93 and 227-229 at 228, respectively. |
| ↑15 | See the discussion of “Formalism” at https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/f/formalism. |
| ↑16 | Parker Hodges, “Robert Mapplethorpe: Photographer,” Manhattan Gazette (December 10, 1979–January 6, 1980) at 5. |
| ↑17 | In addition to the male nudes, Mapplethorpe took many nude photographs of female bodybuilder Lisa Lyon, which tended to emphasize her toned and muscular physique. The photographs were published, to mixed reviews, in book form: Robert Mapplethorpe and Bruce Chatwin, Lady: Lisa Lyon (New York: Viking Press, 1983). |
| ↑18 | See, for example, Robert Mapplethorpe and Ntozake Shange, The Black Book (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986). For a selection of Mapplethorpe male nudes online, see http://www.mapplethorpe.org/portfolios/male-nudes/?i=1. |
| ↑19 | See Lindsay Nixon, “Distorted Love: Mapplethorpe, the Neo/Classical Sculptural Black Nude, and Visual Cultures of Transatlantic Enslavement,” Imaginations, vol. 10, no. 1, 2019, 295-324 at 303: “Mapplethorpe’s choice to objectify, dehumanize, and sexualize the Black men in his sculptural photography is an assertion of domination over the Black body. Mapplethorpe evokes a history of classical sculpture—and the anti-Black ideologies at its core—that continue to make the Black male body an object inherently available for white ownership through voyeuristic spectatorship.” See also Robert Reid-Pharr, “Putting Mapplethorpe in His Place” (February 23, 2016) on the ArtNews website, at https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/putting-mapplethorpe-in-his-place-63141/. Summarizing criticism by Kobena Mercer and Essex Hemphill, Reid-Pharr writes that Mapplethorpe’s “ability to photograph (black) bodies as if they were marble or bronze sculptures, actually continues a centuries-long tradition of separating black physicality from black subjectivity.” |
| ↑20 | Essex Hemphill asserts that: “The penis becomes the identity of the black male, which is the classic stereotype re-created and presented as art in the context of a gay vision…. What is insulting and endangering to black men on one level is Mapplethorpe’s conscious determination that the faces, the heads, and by extension, the minds and experiences of some of his black subjects were not as important as close-up shots of their penises.” (As quoted in Morrisroe, Mapplethorpe, supra note 5, Chapter 17.) Man in Polyester Suit has attracted a great deal of commentary, with some critics arguing that it is Mapplethorpe’s single best image. Mapplethorpe shot it in a way that cut off Moore’s head because Moore himself insisted that he not be identifiable. |
| ↑21 | Patricia Morrisroe says in an interview from 2014: “For me, Mapplethorpe’s racism was the toughest aspect of his personality. Where did it come from? Certainly growing up in the US in the 50s would have given him plenty of exposure to it. He found the n word sexually stimulating, and used it liberally in relation to his lovers and models. It was as if he didn’t see them as people but as objects – something that’s obvious in his photographs.” See: Xandre Rodríguez, “Mapplethorpe & me” (March 25, 2014) on the Dazed Digital website at https://www.dazeddigital.com/fashion/article/19356/1/mapplethorpe-me. |
| ↑22 | “Introduction by Richard Flood” in Flood, Mapplethorpe X7, supra note 2. Providing some historical context for these photographs, Frances Terpak and Michelle Brunnick write: “By the mid-1970s, kink and sexual deviance had become chic in New York. During the rise of a legendary disco nightlife, an impressive number of hard-core sex clubs were established in the Meatpacking District. Among them, the most notorious was the Mine Shaft, regarded as de rigueur with some celebrities and socialites, as well as Mapplethorpe….” (See Frances Terpak and Michelle Brunnick, “1977: Stars Align” in Frances Terpak, Michelle Brunnick, Patti Smith, Jonathan Weinberg, and Robert Mapplethorpe, Robert Mapplethorpe: The Archive (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2016), 13-33 at 18.) |
| ↑23 | For the two men posing in the living room, see: Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter (1979). Critics note that the fact that the two men were willing to be identified by their full names, at a time when their activities were a crime, gives the image some of its power. The most famous of Mapplethorpe’s extreme images were set out in his X Portfolio of 1978, which includes his self-portrait with a whip inserted in his anus, as well as “two lovers engaging in anal fisting, a man inserting his pinkie finger into his urethra, [and] a man posing submissively on all fours in a head-to-toe latex outfit.” (See “Biography of Robert Mapplethorpe” at The Art Story website, available at https://www.theartstory.org/artist/mapplethorpe-robert/life-and-legacy/#biography_header.) |
| ↑24 | Moore, “Whipping up a storm,” supra note 4. However, I don’t think this criticism is completely valid, as Mapplethorpe shot some of his explicit photographs outside the studio. |
| ↑25 | See Philip Glass and Robert Wilson (1976), Andy Warhol (1983), and Grace Jones (1984) (as painted by graffiti artist Keith Haring). |
| ↑26 | See Deborah Harry (1978), William Burroughs (1980), and Iggy Pop (1981). I also find some of Mapplethorpe’s portraits terrible, and suspect they would have been ignored if they were taken by a lesser-known photographer: see Marianne Faithful (1976), which has the singer balancing precariously on a balustrade, and Alice Neel (1984), which makes the artist’s face into an overwrought death mask. |
| ↑27 | See, for example: the discussion of self portraiture in “The Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe” on the Tate Gallery website at https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/robert-mapplethorpe-11413/photographs-robert-mapplethorpe; “Robert Mapplethorpe: Self Portrait” on the Guggenheim Museum website at https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/2695; and Isobel Parker Philip, “Robert Mapplethorpe: the male gaze—in pictures,” The Guardian (October 27, 2017), available at https://www.theguardian.com/culture/gallery/2017/oct/28/robert-mapplethorpe-the-male-gaze-in-pictures. |
| ↑28 | See Self-Portrait (1980) (with furs and makeup), Self-Portrait (1983) (with switchblade), Self-Portrait (1985) (with horns), and Self-Portrait (1988) (with cane). The self-portrait with the cane is so well-known that it has almost become a visual cliché, but the craftmanship of the image justifies its fame: for more, see the Tate’s discussion at https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/mapplethorpe-self-portrait-ar00496. |
| ↑29 | Mapplethorpe’s flower images function as easy entry point into his work, but critics have different views on whether these images are any good. For example, Sandy Nairne, exhibition director of London’s Institute of Contemporary Art, called them dull (Morrisroe, Mapplethorpe, supra note 5, Chapter 18). I think the images are sometimes inconsistent, but often excellent. |
| ↑30 | See Poppy (1988) and note that the image emphasizes the fine hairs on the stems and unopened bud. In another image from the same year, Roses (1988), a large bouquet of white roses dominates the dark grey background, nearly filling the frame; it could have been shot for a florist’s advertisement. |
| ↑31 | See Little Apollo (1988), Italian Devil (1988), and The Sluggard (1988), the latter two of which are available at https://www.mapplethorpe.org/portfolios/portfolio/selected-works/still-life. |
| ↑32 | Apartment Windows (1977), Television (1982), and New Orleans Interior (1982), all available on the Getty website. Unfortunately, the Getty website versions tend to be low contrast and somewhat muddy-looking; it is worth seeking out higher contrast versions of these images in books or on the Internet. |
| ↑33 | I selected these three images not because they are representative of Mapplethorpe’s work but because each appeals to me in some way. I tried to avoid reading any critical commentaries on these three images until I had finished my own. |
| ↑34 | For further background, see the Tate’s discussion of this image at https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/mapplethorpe-patti-smith-ar00186. |
| ↑35 | Mapplethorpe photographed this flag in the summer of 1977, at a resort on New York’s Fire Island. Mapplethorpe would also photograph a second, more dignified-looking American flag a decade later, in Flag (1987). |
| ↑36 | I didn’t know this when I wrote my commentary, but Mapplethorpe’s pose is based on a famous photograph of heiress Patty Hearst holding a machine gun, which was released by the Symbionese Liberation Army (a terrorist group which kidnapped Hearst) in 1974. For further background, see the Tate’s discussion of the image at https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/mapplethorpe-self-portrait-ar00226. |
| ↑37 | In my view, Mapplethorpe should have chosen either the machine gun or the inverted star—the two together are too much. |
| ↑38 | See Carnation, N.Y.C. (1978) and Fist Fuck/Full Body (1978). |
| ↑39 | See, for example, Robert Flood’s interview of Vik Muniz in Flood, Mapplethorpe X7, supra note 2, 51-53 at 52: “He was primarily a photographer who was trying to make really great pictures. He was not trying to shock people.” See also “A Letter to Robert Mapplethorpe from Catherine Opie,” Mapplethorpe X7, supra note 2, at 97, where Opie writes: “Like you, I also am not interested in shocking, but describing what is in my life.” Mapplethorpe himself said, in an interview shortly before he died: “I’m looking for things I’ve never seen before. But I have trouble with the word ‘shocking’ because I’m not really shocked by anything… I was in a position to take those pictures. I felt an obligation to do them. I knew those people, they were willing to pose for me, and it was something that hadn’t really been captured before by any photographer of any merit…. Basically I’m selfish. I did them for myself—because I wanted to do them, I wanted to see them. I wasn’t trying to educate anyone. I was interested in examining my own reactions.” (As quoted in Terpak and Brunnick, “1977: Stars Align,” supra note 22, at 26.) |
| ↑40 | Cock and Devil (1982). |
| ↑41 | As quoted in Jack Fritscher, “’He was a sexual outlaw’: my love affair with Robert Mapplethorpe,” The Guardian (March 9, 2016), available at https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/mar/09/robert-mapplethorpe-photography-jack-fritscher-look-at-the-pictures. |