Robert Mapplethorpe: classical form, unclassical subject

Robert Mapplethorpe was born in 1946 and died in 1989 of AIDS-related illness, which gives him a working life of under twenty years. In that time he built one of the most instantly identifiable bodies of work in photography, and left behind a set of arguments that outlived him by decades.

He studied at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and began with collage and Polaroids before moving to the medium-format camera and the studio setup that became his signature. His friendship with Patti Smith is documented at length in her own memoir, and his photograph made the cover of her first record in 1975. Sam Wagstaff, a curator and collector, supported his work and assembled a major photography collection during the same years, which put Mapplethorpe inside the institutional conversation about photography as an art form at exactly the moment that conversation was happening.

A vocabulary taken from sculpture

The technical description is dull, and that is the interesting part. Plain background. One or two carefully placed lights. Black and white. The subject centred, or set on a strict diagonal, or cropped to a shape. Long exposures, no accident, no reportage.

This is the grammar of the classical studio nude and of the plaster casts in a nineteenth-century drawing school. Applied to flowers it produces something almost devotional. Applied to a portrait it produces the kind of formality a sitter used to receive from a painter. Applied to the leather subculture of downtown New York in the 1970s, a subject then almost entirely absent from art photography, it produced a collision.

The collision is the work. Nothing about a Mapplethorpe picture of that scene is furtive, candid or documentary. The subject is given the lighting and the compositional respect normally reserved for marble, and it is that transfer of formal dignity, rather than the content, that made people uncomfortable. Run the passes from how to read a picture of power across these images and the finding is consistent: the sitter usually holds the centre, holds the light, and is described with enormous specificity.

How the work was organised

He grouped a large part of the difficult material into portfolios, of which the best known are the X, Y and Z sets made in the late 1970s and early 1980s. One collected the sexual and leather images, one the flowers, one the Black male nudes. Editions were tightly controlled, printing was exacting, and the presentation was that of a print publisher rather than a photojournalist.

That organisation matters for anyone thinking about the market end of this subject, covered in buying prints without being taken. Mapplethorpe understood editions, and he ran his own output as a print business with the same discipline he brought to the lighting. The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, which he set up shortly before his death, has since funded photography and medical research and administers the estate.

What happened after he died

The Perfect Moment, a retrospective organised in 1988 and touring after his death, ran directly into a fight about public money for the arts in the United States. The Corcoran Gallery of Art cancelled its Washington showing in 1989 under political pressure. In 1990 the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati mounted the exhibition anyway, and the museum and its director faced criminal charges over it. A jury acquitted them.

The episode is now taught as a landmark in museum law and in the history of arts funding. It also did something less useful to the work itself: it converted a body of carefully made pictures into a symbol that people argued about without needing to look at any of them.

The criticism that stayed

The lasting critical argument is not the obscenity one. It concerns the pictures of Black male sitters, and it asks whether the classical treatment ennobles a body or converts it into an object of connoisseurship. Kobena Mercer made the case against most influentially and then, unusually for a critic, returned to the material and published a revision that complicated his own reading. Both texts are still in circulation, and both are worth reading before forming a view.

There is a second, quieter objection, which is about the studio itself. Total control produces total authorship: the picture is the photographer’s arrangement, and the sitter is the material. That is the case against the studio tradition generally, and the clearest counter-argument in photography is the practice of Nan Goldin, who worked from inside her own circle with available light and no direction at all. Setting the two next to each other is the fastest way to understand what a studio decision actually costs, and the studies in this site’s gallery sit on the controlled side of that line by design.