Mapplethorpe was born to a middle-class, Catho-
lic family in Floral Park (Queens), New York in
1946, and in 1963 he enrolled in art school at the
Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. One of his most forma-
tive relationships was with the singer and poet Patti
Smith, whom he met in the late sixties. The two
became involved with the underground New York
punk scene centered at the club Max’s Kansas City,
and moved into a room at the Chelsea Hotel, a
landmark of bohemian New York. Smith and Map-
plethorpe had a short-lived romantic relationship
but remained lifelong friends and confidantes, and
she would serve as one of his most frequent models.
While in art school, he was not immediately
drawn to photography, but instead focused on the
more traditional mediums of drawing, painting, and
sculpture. He began to create mixed-media collages
and assemblage pieces, often including images he
lifted from the gay pornographic magazines sold
around Times Square. As Mapplethorpe came to
desire more control over the raw materials for these
assemblages, he began taking his own photographs.
His interest in the medium was particularly spurred
on in 1971 when he met John McKendry, curator of
photographs and prints at the Metropolitan Museum
of Art. McKendry supplied Mapplethorpe with a
Polaroid camera, showed him the photography
archives at the Museum, and brought him to Europe
to meet art collectors. The following year, Map-
plethorpe met another influential figure, curator
Sam Wagstaff, with whom he developed a non-exclu-
sive but long-term intimate relationship. Wagstaff
supported Mapplethorpe in his photographic endea-
vors, providing him with studio space in Manhattan
and in 1976 giving him a Hasselblad camera. He and
Wagstaff avidly collected photographs, and Map-
plethorpe was especially drawn to turn-of-the-century
artists, including Baron von Gloeden, Julia Margaret
Cameron, and F. Holland Day and Nadar.
Mapplethorpe’s early pieces often played with
religious and sexual imagery, yet he was not so
much interested in blaspheming religious authority
as he was in sanctifying carnal acts. He made sev-
eral multi-panel works resembling altarpieces,
including some triptychs that employed mirrors to
implicate the viewer in their sexual imagery. His
earlier interest in more tactile, non-photographic
mediums led him to view his photographs not
merely as images, but as unique art objects. This
tendency is demonstrated by his utilization of
unconventional frames and mixed media, as well
as his experimentation with various printing pro-
cesses, from his early photo-transfers of magazine
images onto cloth and canvas, to the platinum
prints on linen he created in 1987.
Mapplethorpe exercised a great amount of direc-
torial control over his compositions. He was not
interested in documenting chance encounters, and
most of his photography was done within the con-
fines of his studio. He frequently placed drop cloths
or backdrop paper behind his subjects, as if to
emphasize the nature of his pictures as ‘‘set-ups.’’
The images that cemented his notoriety were his
pictures of the sado-masochistic homosexual un-
derground, 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 by 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. The greatest disputes over his work,
however, occurred shortly after his death in 1989,
and made 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
potential public outcry, canceled their plans to exhi-
bit the Mapplethorpe solo show The Perfect
Momentjust two weeks before it was set to open.
The following year, when the exhibition traveled to
the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, the
gallery and its director were indicted for (and sub-
sequently acquitted of) obscenity and child porno-
graphy. The latter charges were a result of
Mapplethorpe’s few nude photographs of children,
which were essentially innocent on their own terms
but became questionable due to 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 jarring
compositions featuring sado-masochistic acts. He
was particularly interested in photographing black
men, posing their chiseled bodies in ways that
clearly enunciate the formal language of classical
sculpture. Toward the end of his career, these refer-
ences became even more straightforward when he
began photographing gleaming white Greek sculp-
tures. He treated inanimate objects and human
subjects with an equal amount of formalist enthu-
siasm; hisEggplantof 1985 seems a blatant refer-
ence to Edward Weston’s iconicPepperof 1930,
particularly with its sensual overtones and keen
attention to texture and shadow.
Although Mapplethorpe was interested in
photographing nudes for both their formal possi-
bilities and their capacity to arouse, he never objec-MAPPLETHORPE, ROBERT