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Robert Mapplethorpe, 'Self-portrait', 1980 (detail). © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission.
Political legacy
Sexuality, freedom and living life as a political act: the legacy of Robert Mapplethorpe
Video
Patti Smith Interview: First Encounters with Robert Mapplethorpe
In her 2010 memoir Just Kids, Smith tells of that those early formative years together, recalling her first sighting of Mapplethorpe in a back bedroom, where she saw ‘a sleeping youth cloaked in light’.
Length: 10:35
The Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras
Find out more about the history of gay liberation in Sydney through the origins of the Mardi Gras in a 1978 street protest, and its ties to the New York Stonewall riots of 1969.
Mapplethorpe presents the naked male body as both a target of prohibition and a source of pleasure,
as both an example of censorship and a defiance of it.
— Richard Meyer
