Robert Mapplethorpe

Mapplethorpe grew up in a middle-class Catholic family in Queens and later described suburbia as “a good place to come from, and a good place to leave.”^*1 He entered Pratt Institute in 1963, studying drawing, painting, and sculpture while encountering Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp. His collages combined clippings from magazines and books with fabric and found objects.^*1 After receiving a Polaroid camera in 1970, he found it “more honest” to make the images used in his collages himself and became increasingly engaged with photography. His 1973 exhibition Polaroids at Light Gallery presented that transition as an independent body of work.^*1 Mapplethorpe described photography as a “perfect medium” whose speed suited modern life. The near-immediate appearance of the Polaroid image answered his desire to turn bodies, desire, and familiar objects into form without delay.^*11 He shared a life and an artistic development with Patti Smith, each supporting the other’s work. After receiving a Hasselblad from Sam Wagstaff in the early to mid-1970s, he began photographing friends, artists, social figures, film actors, and members of the S&M community in earnest. The impulse to “make an image,” developed through collage and sculpture, expanded into the studio, lighting, printing, publishing, and exhibition.^*1

From Collage to Polaroid

Mapplethorpe’s photography began with the problem of cutting and rearranging existing images in collage. Clippings from magazines and books already carried the uses and meanings assigned by publication. Making his own photographs with a Polaroid allowed him to determine the subject, bodily pose, background, and frame together at the moment of exposure. He called the method “more honest” because it enabled him to make images grounded in his own experience and desire for which he could assume full responsibility.^*1 The Polaroid, appearing as a physical object immediately after exposure, moved collage’s cutting and placement inside the camera and made the result available for immediate review. Mapplethorpe also believed that photography’s speed suited a modern life that no longer allowed time to wait for a painted portrait.^*11 After the 1973 Polaroids exhibition, photography became his primary medium for preserving and circulating his life, friends, and bodies as independent images.

Photography as Sculpture

Mapplethorpe said that in another era he might have been a sculptor and understood photography as a way to make and see sculpture quickly.^*11 The Hasselblad’s square format, plain backgrounds, lighting that isolates contours, and exact direction of pose turn three-dimensional bodies into self-contained forms. Getty Museum materials describe his pursuit of perfected composition and lighting across different subjects while noting that sexual tension and disorder remain beneath the controlled surface.^*11 Classical balance gave private experience a durable visual form and treated New York desire with the same rigor associated with historical art. Nudes, flowers, portraits, and S&M acts share a common treatment of light and print, bringing differences of form, surface, and pose ahead of the social hierarchy of subjects. This formal consistency allowed experiences from an underground culture to persist within museums and photobooks.

S&M Photographs: Experience and Trust

Mapplethorpe made his late-1970s S&M photographs with people he came to know through New York leather bars and clubs. He explained that his interest in the experiences preceded the photographs, that the participants wanted the acts, and that trust was central to the relationship.^*12 His foundation’s biography records his rejection of the label “shocking”: he sought what he had not yet seen and believed he was in a position, and under an obligation, to photograph it.^*1 Images of restraints, leather, and bodily contact use lucid lighting and still composition to move away from a voyeuristic view that consumes only the intensity of the act. They give lasting form to participants’ posture, agency, and relations. Through strict formal control, underground experience entered public space, where the questions of who is shown, who consents, and who looks became part of the work.

Patti Smith and Lisa Lyon

Mapplethorpe’s portraits are shaped through an exchange between the photographer’s construction and the sitter’s self-presentation. He and Patti Smith shared life and work before either was known, strengthening one another’s confidence and artistic activity.^*12 The 1975 cover of Horses turns Smith’s chosen clothing and attitude—a white shirt, black jacket, tilted body, and direct gaze—into a concise public image. In the series with Lisa Lyon, muscles, dresses, leather, fabric, makeup, nudity, and masculine and feminine gestures continually shift, producing several gendered images from one body. The foundation’s biography records that they collaborated over several years on portraits, figure studies, film, and the photobook Lady: Lisa Lyon.^*1 Smith’s musical self-image and Lyon’s bodily performance gave specific direction to Mapplethorpe’s light and framing. Portraiture became a collaboration in which photographer and subject designed the figure they wished to present in the studio.

Flowers, Bodies, and Test Prints

Mapplethorpe treated flowers, nudes, and portraits as variations on the same formal problem: adjusting the contours of stems, muscles, fabric, skin, and background. Getty Museum materials show his pursuit of compositional and lighting perfection across subjects, while describing perfection as a goal that always demanded another attempt.^*11 The smoothness of the finished work emerged through prolonged selection and printing after the session. He studied contact sheets for hours and, with printers including Tom Baril, who joined the studio in 1979, adjusted the depth of blacks, tonal range, and surface of the paper.^*11 The archive acquired by the Getty Research Institute and LACMA preserves collages, Polaroids, contact sheets, tests, correspondence, and exhibition records, revealing the studio as an organization built around repetition and revision.^*14 The taut contours shared by flowers and bodies were produced through photographing, selecting, and reprinting, not through a single flash of inspiration.

Patti Smith and Horses

The photograph Patti Smith, used for the cover of Horses, brings together an album publicity image and the history of the life and work Smith and Mapplethorpe shared. MoMA publishes the image and records the 1975 album cover as a collaboration among Robert Mapplethorpe, Bob Heimall, and Arista Records.^*3 The white shirt, black jacket, slight tilt of the body, and direct gaze condense Smith’s clothing and posture into an image of a poet, musician, and young artist. Mapplethorpe’s light and framing support an attitude he understood through their long shared life and send it into mass circulation through the record. Because the relationship between photographer and subject forms the work’s premise, the portrait can be read as a jointly produced artistic identity the two had forged in New York.

Lisa Lyon: The Body in Transformation

In the series that includes the 1982 photograph Lisa Lyon, changes in trained musculature, clothing, props, makeup, and pose unfold several personae from Lyon’s body.^*4 The photobook Lady: Lisa Lyon sequences nudes that recall classical sculpture with fashion images, masculine gestures, feminine dress, and theatrical roles. The foundation’s publication record lists it as a major book of 1983.^*10 Lighting turns muscle into sculptural mass, while Lyon’s performance moves the same body among different gendered signs. By combining the construction of bodily form with the subject’s self-staging, the series introduces change over time into the stable division of male and female assumed by classical traditions of the nude.

Tulips: Tension Between Flower and Body

In Tulips, the straight lines of slender stems, curves of petals, dark background, and broad areas of empty space are precisely adjusted. The Getty Museum publishes the image and records it as a 1988 gelatin silver print.^*2 Tensions between opening and closure, hardness and softness, verticality and inclination give the plant’s contour a bodily sensation. Mapplethorpe found forms in flowers and nudes that carried associations of surface, growth, decline, and sexuality, and treated both through common lighting and composition. His sustained work with flowers into the final years of his life can be understood as a formal study in producing bodily tension from minimal shape and tonal range.

Self-Portrait: Facing Death

In Self-Portrait, made near the end of his life, Mapplethorpe’s face and hand emerge from black clothing and a dark background, while his hand grips a cane topped with a skull. The Whitney Museum publishes the image and records it as a 1988 gelatin silver print.^*5 After his AIDS diagnosis in 1986, Mapplethorpe accelerated his work and established a foundation in 1988 to support photography and fund HIV/AIDS research.^*1 The self-portrait reduces the image to face, hand, and cane, turning the time imposed by illness into a severe composition. The skull declares death; the hand gripping the cane and the gaze directed at the camera show that the image remains under his control. An artist who had long included his own body and desire in his work also determined how a body approaching death would be shown through light, pose, and print.

The Perfect Moment: Photography and Censorship

The retrospective The Perfect Moment, organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, in 1988, presented flowers, celebrity portraits, nudes, photographs of children, and works from the S&M community as a continuous body of work by one artist.^*11 Sexually explicit photographs appeared in a publicly funded museum as works of art alongside flowers and portraits. The Corcoran Gallery of Art canceled its presentation in 1989. When the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati mounted the exhibition in 1990, the museum and its director, Dennis Barrie, faced criminal obscenity charges over seven works.^*7 A jury acquitted them, and the case became a central episode in the culture wars surrounding artistic expression, public funding, homosexuality, the public presence of bodies, and museum responsibility.^*8 Mapplethorpe’s exact lighting and printing made it difficult to separate the sexual photographs formally from the flowers and portraits. Institutions were consequently forced to answer which bodies they would exclude from public art on the basis of subject matter.

The X, Y, and Z Portfolios: Form and Power

The X, Y, and Z portfolios organize S&M scenes, floral still lifes, and nudes of Black men as three corresponding series. LACMA dates X and Y to 1978 and Z to 1981 and records that Mapplethorpe proposed displaying the three groups in vertical correspondences.^*6 Square framing, controlled light, dense blacks, and lucid contours give equal formal attention to subjects that society has valued differently. That visual balance leaves unresolved the power differences structured by race, gender, the relation between photographer and model, and the art market. The Guggenheim exhibition Implicit Tensions reconsidered Mapplethorpe’s legacy through later criticism and artistic responses concerning homosexual desire, the Black male nude, images of women, and the agency of subjects.^*9 X, Y, and Z gave classical form to taboo subjects while leaving a further question: whose bodies were classified by whose desire and order?

The Archive and the Foundation

Mapplethorpe treated photographing, printing, publishing, exhibiting, selling, and establishing a foundation as a continuous artistic enterprise, extending his decisions to how his images would survive and be seen. The works and papers jointly acquired by the Getty and LACMA in 2011 include finished prints, early collages, Polaroids, contact sheets, test photographs, correspondence, studio records, and materials related to exhibitions and censorship debates.^*14 Getty’s archival research shows that student work, sculpture, jewelry, and commercial assignments were also preserved, revealing Mapplethorpe as a curator of his own production, a collector, and a businessman as well as a photographer.^*15 The two museums divided the material between exhibitions: LACMA emphasized early experiments and underground culture, while the Getty focused on studio discipline, classical form, and printmaking.^*13 The foundation Mapplethorpe established in 1988 supports photography exhibitions and funds HIV/AIDS research.^*1 His place in photographic history rests in the way he joined desire, form, technique, relations with models, and systems of circulation into a single artistic undertaking.