Robert Mapplethorpe

Robert Mapplethorpe is seen as one of the most technically skilled photographers of all time. He is talked about as much for his skills in the darkroom and his ability to arrange and light his pictures as he is for his sexual experimentation and provocative subjects.

Mapplethorpe’s photographic production includes subjects as contradictory as flower arrangements, classic nudes, self-portraits and BDSM. Mapplethorpe’s pictures encapsulate developments on the photography scene in the 1970s and 80s, where photography as a genre changed from being documentary to conceptual and started to be viewed as an art form in its own right. They also reflect the vibrant gay scene in New York and the threat of AIDS. His many pictures of black, male models were innovative at the time. Here we see one of his recurring models, Thomas Williams, in a beautiful photograph in profile from 1986. When Mapplethorpe and Williams first met, Williams was a bodybuilder and aspiring actor. Later, once Mapplethorpe’s photographs of him had become famous, he instead started a career in gay pornography under the name Joe Simmons.

Mapplethorpe drew great inspiration from art history and was interested in classical sculpture as well as surrealist artists like Man Ray. Traces of this are found in his many pictures of sculptures from antiquity and male nudes directly linked to the perfect physical ideal in the ancient world. In many of his portraits and still lives, he plays with shadows and light inspired by the photography of Man Ray and Lee Miller. He approached each subject with the same precision, “perfection” was Mapplethorpe’s watchword throughout his photographic career. In an interview in 1988 he said: “My whole point is to transcend the subject . . . go beyond the subject somehow, so that the composition, the lighting, all around, reaches a certain point of perfection.”

Quote from www.blogs.getty.edu