Robert Mapplethorpe is an American photographer who worked primarily in a studio setting in black & white. Throughout his career, Mapplethorpe published several series of photo work including still-life photography, celebrity portraits, male & female nudes, & self-portraits.
Mapplethorpe was born in Queens, NYC & grew up Catholic. He attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn where he studied sculpture & painting, but dropped out before finishing his degree. It was during this time that Mapplethorpe met artist, poet, & musician Patti Smith. The pair lived together in the Chelsea Hotel from 1967-1972, created art together, & remained close friends throughout Mapplethorpe’s life.
Despite being trained in painting & sculpture, Mapplethorpe gravitated towards photography. He started making erotic collages with images cut from pornographic magazines & then began creating his own photographs using a Polaroid SX-70 camera. Increasingly interested in portraiture, Mapplethorpe briefly worked for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. In 1972, Mapplethorpe met art curator, Sam Wagstaff, who became his mentor & lover. Wagstaff encouraged Mapplethorpe’s photography career by providing him cameras & studio space, as well as connecting him with New York galleries. In the mid-1970s, Wagstaff acquired a medium-format camera for the artist & Mapplethorpe began taking photographs of his friends. Mapplethorpe photographed Patti Smith for the cover of her Horses album, released in 1975.
In 1977, Mapplethorpe became lovers with writer Jack Fritscher, who introduced Mapplethorpe to Mineshaft - a members-only BDSM gay leather bar & sex club in Manhattan. Mapplethorpe began photographing the gay male BDSM scene in New York & later became Mineshaft’s official photographer.
It was also in 1977 that Mapplethorpe had his first two substantial shows in New York. One was an exhibition at the Holly Solomon Gallery consisting of his photographs of flowers. He also exhibited a collection of male nudes & sadomasochistic imagery at The Kitchen.
Outside of Mapplethorpe’s more formal celebrity portraits, most of the artist’s body of work has a distinct erotic quality. He became known as a photographer actively documenting the gay male BDSM subculture of NYC in the 1970s. In addition to this subject matter, Mapplethorpe also photographed many black male nudes & nudes of female bodybuilders. The highly muscular & sculpted bodies of these subjects call back to Classical Greek tropes found throughout art history.
Mapplethorpe referred to his own photography as “pornographic” with the aim of arousing the viewer, but his ultimate goal was to have this photography regarded as high art. There is a great HBO documentary about Mapplethorpe called Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures. Outside of the film being a biography of the artist, it also details Mapplethorpe’s struggle to be accepted by museums & other art institutions because of his controversial subject matter. Mapplethorpe really pushed the envelope of what art institutions would consider art. Ultimately, his documentation of the gay male NYC BDSM culture in the 1970s remains such an important relic of queer culture & BDSM history.
By the 1980s, Mapplethorpe’s subject matter mostly focused on male & female nudes, flower still-lifes & portraits of artists & other celebrities in the NYC arts scene including Andy Warhol, Louise Bourgeois, Robert Rauschenberg, Debbie Harry, Truman Capote, William Burroughs, Cindy Sherman, Grace Jones, Iggy Pop, Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, David Hockney, & others.
Patti Smith wrote about Mapplethorpe’s work in her memoir Just Kids,
“Robert took areas of dark human consent & made them into art. He worked without apology, investing the homosexual with grandeur, masculinity, & enviable nobility. Without affectation, he created a presence that was wholly male without sacrificing feminine grace. He was not looking to make a political statement or an announcement of his evolving sexual persuasion. He was presenting something new, something not seen or explored as he saw & explored it. Robert sought to elevate aspects of the male experience, to imbue homosexuality with mysticism. As Cocteau said of a Genet poem, ‘His obscenity is never obscene.’”
In 1989, Mapplethorpe died at the age of 42 due to complications from HIV/AIDS. A year before his death, Mapplethorpe founded the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation which has since promoted his work throughout the world & raised millions of dollars to fund medical research for AIDS & HIV.
Additional resources on Robert Mapplethorpe:
Films:
Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures
Books:
Robert Mapplethorpe by Patricia Morrisroe
Polaroids by Robert Mapplethorpe
Mapplethorpe by Robert Mapplethorpe
Articles:
“Patti Smith & Robert Mapplethorpe” by Christopher Bollen for Interview Magazine, 2010
God i love this man. I love his relationship with Patti and his photography was just perfect
i love how he made space for tasteful eroticism, even if conservatives at the time couldn’t see the vision and actively sought for him to be boycotted/blackballed. his work is truly something special