Robert Mapplethorpe

photographer

Although he did not begin his artistic career with a camera, Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs earned him a reputation that transcended the boundaries of the art world and permeated popular culture. This notoriety was partly due to the inherent power of his images, but also as a result of heated controversies over the transgressive nature of his subject matter. Mapplethorpe’s oeuvre – largely consisting of nudes, flowers and portraits – is characterised by a remarkable clarity of vision that emphasises a sensual formalism. His thematic range is remarkably consistent, as the themes that preoccupied him as a young student remained with him throughout his relatively short artistic career.
Born into a middle-class Catholic family in Floral Park, Queens, New York, in 1946, Mapplethorpe enrolled in art school at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, in 1963. One of his most formative relationships was with the singer and poet Patti Smith, whom he met in the late sixties. The two became involved in New York’s underground punk scene, centred around the club Max’s Kansas City, and moved into a room in the Chelsea Hotel, a landmark of bohemian New York. Smith and Mapplethorpe had a short-lived romantic relationship, but remained lifelong friends and confidants, and she would serve as one of his most frequent models.
While at art school, Mapplethorpe was not immediately drawn to photography, concentrating instead on the more traditional media of drawing, painting and sculpture. He began to create mixed-media collages and assemblages, often incorporating images taken from the gay pornographic magazines sold around Times Square. As Mapplethorpe wanted more control over the raw materials for these assemblages, he began to take his own photographs.
His interest in the medium was sparked in 1971 when he met John McKendry, curator of photographs and prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. McKendry provided Mapplethorpe with a Polaroid camera, showed him the museum’s photographic archives and brought him to Europe to meet art collectors. The following year, Mapplethorpe met another influential figure, the curator Sam Wagstaff, with whom he developed a non-exclusive but long-term intimate relationship. Wagstaff supported Mapplethorpe’s photographic endeavours, providing him with studio space in Manhattan and giving him a Hasselblad camera in 1976. He and Wagstaff collected photographs avidly, and Mapplethorpe was particularly drawn to turn-of-the-century artists, including Baron von Gloeden, Julia Margaret Cameron, and F. Holland Day and Nadar.
Mapplethorpe’s early work often played with religious and sexual imagery, but he was less interested in blaspheming religious authority than in sanctifying carnal acts. He made several multi-panel works that resembled altarpieces, including some triptychs that used mirrors to implicate the viewer in their sexual imagery. His earlier interest in more tactile approaches led him to see his photographs not just as images but as unique objects of art. This tendency is evident in his use of unconventional framing and mixed media, as well as his experimentation with different printing processes, from his early photo-transfers of magazine images onto fabric and canvas to the platinum prints on linen he created in 1987.
Mapplethorpe exercised a great deal of directorial control over his compositions. He was not interested in documenting chance encounters and most of his photographs were taken within the confines of his studio. He often placed drop cloths or backdrops behind his subjects, as if to emphasise the nature of his images as ‘set pieces’.
The images that cemented his reputation were his images of the sadomasochistic homosexual underground, a subculture with which he was directly involved. His explicit photographs of erect penises, men in bondage gear and various sexual acts not usually seen in mainstream society had a volatile impact and led to a number of controversies. A 1983 solo exhibition at the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice was closed to minors due to the content of the artwork. However, the greatest controversy surrounding his work occurred shortly after his death in 1989, making him a key figure in the so-called ‘culture wars’ of the 1980s and 1990s. In June 1989, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., fearing a possible public outcry, cancelled its plans for a Mapplethorpe solo exhibition, The Perfect Moment, just two weeks before it was due to open.
The following year, when the show travelled to the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, the gallery and its director were charged (and subsequently acquitted) with obscenity and child pornography.
The latter charges were a result of Mapplethorpe’s few nude photographs of children, essentially innocent on their face, but made questionable by his reputation as a documenter of sexual deviance.
The great dynamic in Mapplethorpe’s work is the tension between his subject matter, which is powerfully transgressive and sometimes shocking, and his manner of composition, which is highly traditional and classicist. His interest in beauty and symmetry is present even in his most disturbing compositions of sadomasochistic acts. He was particularly interested in photographing black men, posing their chiseled bodies in ways that clearly echo the formal language of classical sculpture. Towards the end of his career, these references became even more explicit when he began photographing gleaming white Greek sculptures.
He treated inanimate objects and human subjects with equal formalist enthusiasm; his Eggplant of 1985 seems a blatant reference to Edward Weston’s iconic Pepper of 1930, particularly with its sensual overtones and keen attention to texture and shadow.
Although Mapplethorpe was interested in photographing the nude for both its formal possibilities and its capacity to arouse, he never objectified his models into mere flesh. He preferred to emphasise the humanity of sexuality, which is underlined by the fact that he always titled his figure studies with the names of his models, unless they expressed a preference for anonymity.
This naming emphasises the personhood of his subjects and their complicity in his work.
His photography is also notable for its problematisation of the dualisms of gender and sexuality. In some self-portraits from 1980, he plays with androgynous imagery, dressing himself as a woman in make-up and fur, not unlike Marcel Duchamp’s alter ego Rrose Selavy. His 1983 book of photographs of bodybuilding champion Lisa Lyon shows her in a series of poses that humorously undermine stereotypes of femininity.
Mapplethorpe was not afraid to use his art for commercial projects, often doing fashion shoots and celebrity portraits for magazines such as Interview, Vanity Fair and Harper’s.
His early involvement in the New York music scene also led him to photograph a number of album covers for Patti Smith, Television, Laurie Anderson and others.
Mapplethorpe died in 1989, three years after being diagnosed with AIDS. The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, established by the artist the year before his death, continues to promote photography and fund AIDS research.