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Mapplethorpe also made wryly humorous images that hint at coupling a hand tugging a sheet across a striped mattress evokes the emotional push/pull of romance. In these small, intimate images (no larger than 10cm by 13cm), we see his appreciation for ordinary things - a ceramic jug, for example, or a shop-window display of children's shoes. At the same time, he made pictures of unremarkable subjects in the outer world. Yet it is emblematic of this body of work for its display of the intensity with which Mapplethorpe sought access to inner worlds through photography. It is a deceptive, seemingly naive photograph, as the artist gropes for the shutter. In an early self-portrait, Mapplethorpe captures himself in a spontaneous display of candour, with uncombed hair and piercing eyes looking intently in the direction of the camera but not at the lens itself. This visual responsiveness to the moment is one of the distinguishing characteristics of this body of work.
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Long before digital technology made instant viewing a standard part of picture-making, Polaroid cameras gave rapid results. The Polaroid process was particularly appealing for its immediacy. For Robert, taking pictures was a means of seduction and a catalyst for sex. For his subjects, being photographed by Mapplethorpe was often an erotic experience. As he embraced homosexuality, he made dozens of photographs of handsome young men gazing at the camera with sultry come-hither looks or staring past the photographer in states of suspended consciousness. Within his first year of taking pictures, Mapplethorpe also began to explore his sexual attraction to men, trying to determine whether he was gay, straight or bisexual, and the Polaroid camera became an accomplice and an aid. On the one hand, she offered inspiration on the other, she validated his endeavours with her participation. More than any of Mapplethorpe's subjects, Smith was both a muse and a mirror for him. In others, she is cocky, vulnerable, or defiant. In one, Patti appears as an aloof bohemian with a cigarette, resembling the painter Lee Krasner or the Italian screen actor Anna Magnani. Others hint at Mapplethorpe's and Smith's ferocious attachment. Some images are infused with the affection that comes with long friendship and intimacy. Over the next decade, Mapplethorpe made hundreds of photographs of Smith. He had been a student of graphic arts at Pratt Institute, and was then sharing a room in the Chelsea Hotel on 23rd Street in Manhattan with the young poet and future rock singer Patti Smith. Soon, though, he discovered the gratification of making Polaroid photographs to be appreciated in their own right. Mapplethorpe first began using Polaroid materials in 1970, when he borrowed an instant camera to take photographs for the homoerotic collages he was making at the time. The resulting works give us unprecedented access to his creative development at a time when he was shaping his identity as an artist and as a man.
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But above all, Mapplethorpe learned how to see photographically with Polaroid materials. Some convey an unexpected tenderness and vulnerability others have a toughness and immediacy that would give way in later years to a more refined formalism. Unlike the carefully crafted and controlled images he staged later in the studio, Mapplethorpe's Polaroids are marked by spontaneous invention.
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In notebooks filled with plastic sleeves that held black-and-white Polaroid photographs, I found pictures so intimate in their revelation of Mapplethorpe's curiosity about seeing with the camera that I felt I was peering into the photographer's diary. This remarkable treasure trove of more than 1,500 photographs, the majority of them never published, reveal how instant photography provided Mapplethorpe with a mode of entry into his creative ambition, his sexual desires and the art world at large.įour years ago, invited by the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation to visit its archive, I asked to see lesser-known, quirky works rather than the signature works that are contained in the dozens of books on Mapplethorpe that have been published over the years. But before these works - and before his equally famous nudes, flower studies and celebrity portraits made between the late 1970s and his death from Aids in 1989 - Mapplethorpe was taking hundreds of Polaroids. Robert Mapplethorpe's sexually explicit, homoerotic photographs made him one of the most notorious photographers of the 1980s and a lightning rod for social and political conservatives.