Photographer Robert Mapplethorpe grew to become one of the most widely-recognised and ground-breaking artists of the twentieth century; known for his iconic black and white shots, celebrity portraits, self-portraits, and nudes, Mapplethorpe’s work effortlessly encapsulated New York’s avant-garde underground scene in the 1970s and 80s. 

Born in 1946 in Queens NYC, Mapplethorpe was raised in a strict Catholic household with three brothers and two sisters, and was of mixed English, Irish, and German descent. Mapplethorpe’s creative potential was evident from an early age, and at just sixteen he enrolled at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn where he majored in graphic arts, whilst also studying painting, drawing, and sculpture. At the Pratt Institute, Mapplethorpe experimented with mixed media collaging, using both magazine cut outs and polaroid photographs as his primary medium of artistic expression. In 1969, however, he dropped out of art school and began to pursue a career in photography. His first exhibition was in 1973 at the Light Gallery in New York and was called Polaroids; showcasing the work he produced whilst at school and paying homage to his love for the authentic beauty of simple black and white photography. 

During this time Mapplethorpe’s career began to blossom and he started photographing portraits of people he knew in New York, from musicians and artists to porn stars, and later many celebrities- most notably singer-songwriter Patti Smith, who became a central figure of the New York punk rock movement. Robert and Patti were acquainted in 1967 and lived and worked together throughout their careers, both feeding off and being inspired by each other’s creativity. Mapplethorpe photographed the cover art for Smith’s 1973 poetry collection Witt, along with her debut 1975 album Horses. He also incorporated photographs of her into his own work, such as his 1979 portrait titled Patti Smith where the musician-cum-poet is shot in a white dress holding a turtle dove in each hand. Mapplethorpe also collaborated with many other famous individuals of the period, including writers Truman Capote and William Burroughs and artists Andy Warhol and Keith Haring. These connections grounded him and his work within the New York celebrity sphere.  

Alongside his celebrity photography, Mapplethorpe was known for his many self-portraits. These were his means of exploring human individuality through photography. In one of his most famous self-portraits, from his 1985 collection A Book of Portraits, Mapplethorpe adorns a fur boa around his shoulders and wears subtle eye makeup; presenting his viewer with a feminised and androgynous persona. However, one of the other self-portraits within this collection presents a starkly different figure, with Mapplethorpe wearing a leather biker jacket, with his hair slicked back in a classic 50s style, wielding a butterfly knife- a photograph which evokes a hyper-masculine image of a violent thug. Through his self-portraits Mapplethorpe used himself as the central subject of his work in order to experiment with the subject of identity by exploring its fluidity, which each of his different photographic personas collectively served to visually articulate.

Mapplethorpe’s impressive career did not come without controversy however, and frequently his work was challenged, critiqued, and even censored. One incident of the latter being the cancellation of his solo exhibition at the Cocoran Gallery of Art in 1989. This exhibition, titled The Perfect Moment, displayed a collection of homoerotic BDSM photography, including sadomasochistic imagery, shots of urophagia (consumption of urine), as well as a self-portrait of Mapplethorpe in a leather gimp suit with a bullwhip inserted into his anus. The X-rated male-on-male nature of this collection caused an enormous outcry at the time from conservative and religious groups, such as the American Family Association, who deemed Mapplethorpe’s work as vulgar, obscene, subversive and a waste of government funding to the arts.  Subsequently the Cocoran Gallery of Art cancelled the show. 

Mapplethorpe’s 1986 collection, The Black Book, has also come under fire, as many critics argue that its content ultimately fetishizes black men. The collection is composed of nude photographs solely of athletic black boys, with many of the shots being fragmented images of muscular torsos, backs, buttocks, and arms. Whilst Mapplethorpe’s biographer Patricia Morrisroe suggested that he chose to exclusively use black men in this collection in order to capture the “greater richness from the colour of their skin”, many of his critics argue that The Black Book is sexually exploitative of black men and their bodies, and shows a lack of concern for black communities by presenting them as solely sexual subjects for white observation.

In the same year that The Black Book was published, Mapplethorpe was diagnosed with AIDS, a virus that caused the deaths of thousands of LGBTQ+ people across America in the 1980’s. Two years after his diagnosis, Mapplethorpe founded the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, a charity that was dedicated to supporting galleries that exhibit photography, and providing funding for crucial medical research in the fight against the AIDS epidemic.

On the 9th of March 1989 Mapplethorpe died of the virus at the age of just 42. Although his life was cut tragically short, the legacy of Mapplethorpe’s work will forever live on, as his breath-taking black and white photography continues to be displayed in museums and galleries across the world. Mapplethorpe’s beautiful and expressive portraits, and his ability to capture the diverse subcultures of 1970’s and 80s New York through a camera lens, has made him one of the contemporary art world’s most innovative and significant figures to date. 

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