Robert Mapplethorpe, beauty assumed
« American photographer (1946-1989), portraitist, flower photographer, chronicler of New York's S/M scene. »
A Pratt student, living with Patti Smith at the Chelsea Hotel in the late 1960s, Robert Mapplethorpe started with collage before turning to photography in the mid-1970s. His project was coherent from the start: classical formal beauty applied to subjects society refused — gay bodies, S/M, sexualised flowers.
The X Portfolio (1978) — explicit photographs of New York's BDSM scene — divided. The Y Portfolio (flowers) and Z Portfolio (Black male nudes) completed a polemical triptych. Mapplethorpe also photographed Patti Smith for Horses (1975) and made portraits of Susan Sontag, Andy Warhol, Iggy Pop.
Diagnosed HIV-positive in 1986, he accelerated his output. His retrospective The Perfect Moment (1988) ignited, after his death in 1989, an American political battle — Congress moved to cut a museum's public funding. The cause of photography as fine art emerged strengthened. He was 42.