Robert Mapplethorpe: An LGBT Icon in Photography
Robert Mapplethorpe always knew he would become a revolutionary, even when he had nothing. In the late 60s, he lived in decrepit apartments with Patti Smith, never knowing when they’d be able to afford their next coffee and donut for lunch, but he was determined to create.
Patti Smith (left) and Robert Mapplethorpe (right)
He was the third of six children, born in 1946. His household was conservative, heavily catholic, nestled within the quiet suburb of Floral Park. Mapplethorpe always saw his hometown as too safe to stay, too safe to ever provide him with what he needed in life. It was only once he met Patti Smith, after leaving Floral Park for Brooklyn, that he began to experiment fully with his art. Together, they threw themselves into creating, experimenting with drugs to develop their artistic styles throughout their tumultuous and intense relationship.
Heavily influenced by Andy Warhol, Joseph Cornell, and Marcel Duchamp, Robert explored a variety of mediums, from collages, to paintings, to drawings before picking up a polaroid in the late 1960s. His father had always been a photographer – their basement even included a dark room. However, Robert had not shown an interest until he began photographing Patti Smith – someone who completely changed his world vision, he says. They loved each other dearly, and remained close friends throughout Robert’s life.
In the 1970s, his art took a turn for celebrity – he discovered the value of public outrage. Robert Mapplethorpe’s queer BDSM works redefined photography, providing the frame for a sexual revolution. He was able to explore, through his trademark black and white nude images, the LGBT male BDSM subculture of New York City, in the late 60s and early 70s. These images were so intimate and true that they became quintessential of LGBT art history. His works were poetic, shocking, and offered an examination into a culture that most Americans, by default, knew nothing about.
He was able to both thrill and horrify – even referring to his own work as “pornographic,” aiming to arouse his audience all while regarding it as high art. He took the dark areas of human sexuality and made it into art. His exploration of LGBTQ+ culture was grand, masculine, and noble – embracing a wholly male presence without any sacrifice of feminine grace. This was entirely renegade, something never seen before, elevating the mysticism of the male experience. Through this, he changed popular culture. The sort of erotic photographs he once dared to shoot and now standard in society – taken every day on Snapchat and Grindr.
His most truthful explorations of the human body and desire came about towards the end of the 1970s and early 1980s, in works such as Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter (1979), Ken Moody (1983/1984), and Joe/Rubberman (1978). The inherent vulnerability that is so clear in the male figures he worked with brought about a new acceptance of sensitivity and embraced femininity for men in America. To this day, the legacy of these vulnerable masterpieces remains important.
His art proved that gay erotica and love could also be high art and could be classic – he worked in studio black-and-white photography, through fine portraits highlighting human grace and beauty. He combined traditional class with rebellious ideas, and that is what captured the world. They couldn’t look away.
By demonstrating the immense beauty within sex and love, in particular in the LGBTQ+ community, Robert invited New York, and indeed all of wider America, to understand the community in a new way. He taught them to see the common ground between all – love. Sensuality. Intimacy.
When he died of AIDS on March 9, 1989 at the young age of 42, Robert left behind a legacy of thousands of beautiful photographs of faces, bodies, and fetishes that assaulted American concepts of sex and gender and reconstructed them altogether. For that reason, his works are still loved and lauded three decades later.
Robert’s works are now classics, with auction prices to match. However, his power is so much more than just the price tags on his photographs. By pushing the American culture wars into high gear, Robert left a legacy that changed the LGBTQ+ community. Canonization is complete – Robert is seen as a saint both in the art world, and beyond it. Once rebellious, his works now hold less controversy, absorbed into the mainstream. Now, he is seen as a martyr, the start of something amazing. Art as sex, sex as art. For Robert, art was a turn-on in every sense. The pictures that once exiled him from society, now keep him in history.
**All photos without sources provided by the Getty
Sources (in order of appearance)
Norman Seef, Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith (1969)
Martineau, Paul and Britt Salvese. Robert Mapplethorpe: The Photographs. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2016.
Mapplethorpe, Robert. Certain People: A Book of Portraits (Pasadena: Twelvetrees Press, 1985), unpaginated.
Levas, Dimitri, ed. Pictures: Robert Mapplethorpe (Santa Fe: Arena Editions; New York: D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, 1999), unpaginated.