The Elegant and Provoking Sculptural Photography of Robert Mapplethorpe

Digvijay Nikam

What kind of relationship might the distinct mediums of sculpture and photography share? What are the limits of artistic expression? The work of the celebrated and equally censored American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe is the right place to unpack these concerns. Born in 1946 in New York and brought up in a strict Catholic environment, Mapplethorpe’s initial inclinations were not towards photography. After graduating with a B.F.A. in painting and sculpture in 1970 from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, he mainly made assemblage constructions that incorporated images of men from pornographic magazines with found objects and painting. In order to create his own images for these collages, Mapplethorpe turned to photography, initially using a Polaroid SX-70 camera and to his astonishment realised that the polaroid photographs could be artistic in their own respect. His first exhibition in 1973 at Light Gallery in New York City, was called Polaroids. 

A couple of years later he switched to a more sophisticated camera, a Hasselblad medium format camera, and started photographing people he knew right from artists, musicians to pornographic film stars as well as other prominent members New York underground scene. Mapplethorpe’s career flourished in the 1980s and he continued to explore and refine his techniques and formats. In 1986, he got diagnosed with AIDS and maybe given the premonitions of impending death, he further accelerated his creative efforts undertaking ambitious projects. In 1988, a year before his death, he had his first major exhibition at The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Portraiture was central to his practice. Shot in different gradations of black and white, the photographs of his subjects emanate a sense of formal elegance and perfection that simultaneously reminds one of painting and sculpture. He sought perfection in form in all his subjects which was one of the most important reasons for his interest in nudes. Many of his sitters included athletic black men who were often models, dancers, and bodybuilders, all with muscular and well-defined bodies. 

The balance and harmony these photographs – of symmetrical figure or fragmented bodies such as torso, an extended arm, buttocks, and thighs – emanate, for instance, his photographs of the artist Derrick Cross, relies on Mapplethorpe’s emphasis on the structure and geometry in composition which immediately resembles the powerful bodies of classical Greek sculpture and their insistence on geometric harmony. Similarly for these reasons, his work is often compared to that of the old masters and artists of the Renaissance. In a 2009 exhibition Mapplethorpe: Perfection in Form, at the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, Italy, his photographs were presented alongside great Renaissance masterpieces such as Michelangelo’s David 1504. 

Mapplethorpe’s career had been stricken with multiple controversies that ultimately helped bolster his popularity. In the summer of 1989, a solo exhibit titled Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment curated by the Institute of Contemporary art created immense uproar and protests. The exhibition included photographs from his X portfolio which features images of urophagia, gay BDSM and a self-portrait with a bullwhip inserted in his anus that brought forth multiple issues concerning the status of public funding for the arts, as well as the perennial questions of censorship and the obscene. Earlier in 198 his solo exhibition “Black Males” and the subsequent book The Black Book sparked controversy for their depiction of black men. 

The subjects of his photography included not just other figures but Mapplethorpe himself as well. Self-portraiture intrigued him immensely given the experimentations it allowed with different aspects of his identity. His self-portraits are a possible subject for research itself given their diversity right from him posing as knife-wielding thug or a transvestite or the archetypal bad boy. One of his most interesting self-portraits includes the one he took towards the very end of his life in 1988. He was battling AIDs and the portrait reflects his ill health, his search for release from his suffering, and his mortality. 

Seated facing straight ahead it seems, one commentator notes, “as if he is looking death in the face – confronting it straight on.” Holding a skull-headed cane in one of his hands, his own head appears disembodied and descending in darkness, accentuating the sentiments of mortality. Yet his stern gaze and firm grip on the cane seems to be suggest a willingness to overcome the predicament. Until the very end of his life, he believed that he could beat AIDS. Interesting, in 2017, the portrait was sold for a record amount of £450,000 at Christie’s.

Despite his demise, his will and legacy continue to live on through the work of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation which he established in 1988 to promote photography, support museums that exhibit photographic art, and to fund medical research in the fight against AIDS and HIV-related infection. Simultaneously the legacy of his work continues to inform contemporary debates surrounding the issues of artistic forms and their interrelationships, the depiction of bodies and the limits of artistic expression. 

Currently his work is being exhibited at numerous galleries including Olga Korper Gallery in Toronto and an exhibition titled Robert Mapplethorpe: Shadows and Light at the Baldwin Gallery, Colorado, USA. 

References 

1. https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/robert-mapplethorpe
2. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/arts/design/robert-mapplethorpe-guggenheim.html
3. https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/robert-mapplethorpe-madre-naples-italy-11901/
4. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2017/10/04/auction-record-for-mapplethorpe-as-christies-introduces-two-new-sales
5. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/robert-mapplethorpe-11413/photographs-robert-mapplethorpe
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Mapplethorpe

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