Robert Mapplethorpe

In 1970 Mapplethorpe borrowed a Polaroid camera from his friend Sandy Daley, an artist and filmmaker living at the Chelsea Hotel.

The Polaroid was revolutionary. With its self-developing film producing a print moments after the shot was taken, the Polaroid became a favourite of partygoers and nightclubbers in the pre-selfie era. Mapplethorpe declared that what drew him to photography was its immediacy, and nothing was more immediate than the instant Polaroid – the ‘perfect medium’ for a time in the 70s and 80s where, according to Mapplethorpe, ‘everything moved so fast’.

Mapplethorpe used Daley’s Polaroid until 1971 when another friend, John McKendry, Curator of Prints and Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art – wanting to foster the talent he saw in him – bought him one for Christmas. McKendry also helped Mapplethorpe with the expensive film costs by arranging a grant for film supply from the Polaroid company.

Mapplethorpe was hooked, finally having what he called the ‘right raw material … more mine’; Polaroids were the opportunity and the technology that allowed Mapplethorpe to really start making his own, rather than ‘other people’s pictures’.

Between 1970 and 1975 Mapplethorpe took more than 1500 Polaroid prints.

https://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Instant_camera

When The Met’s curator John McKendry showed Mapplethorpe through the museum’s photography collection in 1971, Mapplethorpe realised ‘photography maybe could be art. I had never thought about that before, but now I found myself getting excited about the possibilities.’

By 1972, when his lover and patron Sam Wagstaff bought him a Hasselblad medium format camera, Mapplethorpe was turning the corner: within a year, he had held his first solo exhibition – only Polaroids at this stage – at Light Gallery, one of the very few photography galleries in New York at the time. By the middle of the decade, photography had become his primary creative medium.

Mapplethorpe staged two, twinned, exhibitions in New York in 1977 – portraits at the Holly Solomon Gallery and a show of male nudes and sadomasochistic images at The Kitchen. There were no Polaroids at either venue, only black and white gelatin silver prints that remain the epitome of fine art photography.

By the mid‐1980s, Mapplethorpe had established a successful commercial portrait practice, and undertook a host of commercial projects, such as commissions for Vanity Fair. The set up at his 24 Bond Street studio was simple – he worked with just natural light in the early days, or a single light source – but his practice was disciplined. And somewhat unusual: Mapplethorpe’s brother Edward has recalled how Mapplethorpe never entered the darkroom and, unlike many ‘fine art’ photographers, never printed the images himself.

Even though he outsourced some elements of a print’s production, Mapplethorpe prized precision and perfection above all else. In his brother Edward’s words, saying he was all about ‘seeing’: ‘He was about this vision and how he got from there to there really wasn’t really of interest. He just needed to get there.’

Mapplethorpe’s stylist Dimitri Levas said the artist never really prepared ahead of time for shoots, embracing accidents and preferring to pore over contact sheets till he found the right shot. When he did, Mapplethorpe would say: ‘This is the one that has the magic.’

Mapplethorpe knew how to create a persona, whether it was for Patti Smith, Lisa Lyon, or himself, producing innumerable self-portraits. Highly ambitious, Mapplethorpe carefully managed all aspects his career: he strategically made use of his and Wagstaff’s social connections, made calculated decisions about editioning, and shrewdly engaged with the art market.

Mapplethorpe was also always moving between quite distinct worlds: he seemed as comfortable in the presence of high society and in New York’s uptown galleries as he was in downtown leather and S+M bars, or working for gay magazines like Drummer.

Even the decisions Mapplethorpe made about the subjects of his works were informed by a canny sense of career management: while he made celebrity portraits of people because they were his friends, he also recognised how lucrative the process was. And, even the flowers he photographed were not only selected as subjects for their beauty, or for their erotic potential, but because the sale of such attractive and sought-after images helped support his wider practice.

To use his own phrase, Mapplethorpe pursued ‘perfection in form’ in everything he photographed. Like a sculptor working with light, he captured and distilled the most beautiful or compelling aspect of any subject.

Mapplethorpe injected drama into all his images, with economical compositions that put the subject up front and centre stage. But he also expanded and blurred aesthetic categories, giving equal weight to the photography of a figure, a fetish or a flower.

A committed formalist, Mapplethorpe cultivated his own mode of classicism. He didn’t just expand what we think of as a legitimate classical subject, rather, as Jonathan D. Katz suggests, he ‘perverted the aesthetic’ of classicism according to its own terms. He made ‘the traditional formal building blocks of the classical – points, orbs, rods, triangles and so on … respectively anuses, breasts, erections and pubic hair’.

Mapplethorpe, says Katz, introduced the notion of ‘queer classicism’, one that balances ‘control and abandon’.

As an old-fashioned gesture, I once sent Mapplethorpe some flowers at Easter which, to my chagrin, were greeted with snarls. “I hate flowers”, he said and pretended to spit on them. Now, if you will, he still spits on them but with his Hasselblad, or he does something perverse to them that nobody else seems to have thought of before. In any case, these are the elegant distanced shots of one whose obsessive training has perfected his aim to the point where he can hit a gladiola straight in the eye at fifty paces.

— Sam Wagstaff

Looking at those photographs made me think photography maybe could be art. I had never thought about that before, but now I found myself getting excited about the possibilities.

— Robert Mapplethorpe

I think the work moves towards a kind of perfection … but basically the vision is the same.

— Robert Mapplethorpe