Self-Portrait, 1975
Copyright The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation
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ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE
Robert Mapplethorpe was born in 1946, the third of six children and spent his childhood on Long Island, which Mapplethorpe summed up by saying, “I come from suburban America. It was a very safe environment, and it was a good place to come from in that it was a good place to leave.”
Mapplethorpe received a B.F.A. from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he produced artwork in a variety of media. Mapplethorpe had not taken any of his own photographs yet, but he was making art that incorporated many photographic images appropriated from other sources, including pages torn from magazines and books. Mapplethorpe took his first photographs soon thereafter, using a Polaroid camera. He did not consider himself a photographer, but wished to use his own photographic images in his paintings, rather than pictures from magazines.
Mapplethorpe's first Polaroids were self-portraits and the first of a series of portraits of his close friend, the singer-artist-poet Patti Smith. The shift to photography as Mapplethorpe’s sole means of expression happened gradually during the mid-seventies. He acquired a large format press camera and began taking photographs of a wide circle of friends and acquaintances. These included artists, composers, socialites, pornographic film stars and members of the S & M underground. Some of these photographs were shocking for their content but exquisite in their technical mastery. Mapplethorpe told ARTnews in late 1988, “I don’t like that particular word ‘shocking.’ I’m looking for the unexpected. I’m looking for things I’ve never seen before…I was in a position to take those pictures. I felt an obligation to do them.”
During the early 1980s, Mapplethorpe’s photographs began a shift toward a phase of refinement of subject and an emphasis on classical formal beauty. During this period Mapplethorpe concentrated on statuesque male and female nudes, delicate flower still lifes (5 of which we have here), and formal portraits of artists and celebrities. Mapplethorpe continued to challenge the definition of photography by introducing new techniques and formats to his oeuvre: color Polaroids, photogravure, platinum prints on paper and linen, Cibachomes and dye transfer color prints, as well as his earlier black-and-white gelatin silver prints. Mapplethorpe produced a consistent body of work that strove for balance and perfection and established him in the top rank of twentieth-century artists.
In 1987 he established the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation to promote photography, support museums that exhibit photographic art, and to fund medical research and finance projects in the fight against AIDS and HIV-related infection.
www.mapplethorpe.org
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