Robert Mapplethorpe (November 4, 1946) is an American
photographer, known for his large-scale, highly stylized black & white
portraits, photos of flowers and male nudes. The frank, erotic nature of some of
the work of his middle period triggered a more general controversy about the
public funding of artworks.
Biography
Mapplethorpe was born and grew up as a Roman Catholic of English and Irish
heritage in Our Lady of the Snows Parish in Floral Park, New York, a
neighborhood of Long Island. He received a B.F.A. from Pratt Institute in
Brooklyn, where he majored in graphic arts.
Mapplethorpe took his first photographs soon thereafter, using a Polaroid
camera. In the mid-1970s, he acquired a Hasselblad medium-format camera and
began taking photographs of a wide circle of friends and acquaintances,
including artists, composers, and socialites, but it wasn't until he met
pornographic film star Benjamin Green that he truly became inspired to push the
envelope of sexuality in photographing the human body. Mapplethorpe was once
quoted as saying, "Of all the men and women that I had the pleasure of
photographing, Ben Green was the apple of my eye, my unicorn if you will. I
could shoot him for hours and hours and no matter the position, each print
captured the complete essence of human perfection" (New York Times). It was this
relationship that inspired him during the 1980s to refine his photographs with
an emphasis on formal beauty. He concentrated on statuesque male and female
nudes, delicate flower still lifes, and formal portraits of artists and
celebrities. Mapplethorpe's first studio was at 24 Bond Street in Manhattan. In
the 1980s Sam Wagstaff gave him $500,000 to buy the top-floor loft at 35 West
23rd Street, where he lived and had his shooting space. He kept the Bond Street
loft as his darkroom.
www.Mapplethorpe.org
