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Mapplethorpe (text only) Revised Edition edition by Mapplethorpe. Robert
Mapplethorpe [Hardcover] Mapplethorpe. Robert (Photographer)
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1992
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About the author
Robert Mapplethorpe
71 books64 followersRobert Mapplethorpe was an American photographer, known for his large-scale, highly stylized black and white portraits, photos of flowers and naked men. The frank, homosexually erotic nature of some of the work of his middle period triggered a more general controversy about the public funding of artworks.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
June 9, 2017
I read this and others by Mapplethorpe years ago, and especially when his work was the subject of obscenity trials around this country. I read it again because I just completed Just Kids by Patti Smith, her memoir focusing on her life in Manhattan with her livelong love Robert. The range of work is amazing, and clearly he was a great artist. Unfortunately he is best known and dismissed widely for his bdsm portraits, which obscures his legacy somewhat because some people just don't want to look at that work.
I read this through today to look at the portraits he did over his lifetime of Patti Smith, which are pure and loving and powerful and so good. Here's not the way he would want you to see them, but there is an array of them on this google page:
https://images.search.yahoo.com/searc...
I read this through today to look at the portraits he did over his lifetime of Patti Smith, which are pure and loving and powerful and so good. Here's not the way he would want you to see them, but there is an array of them on this google page:
https://images.search.yahoo.com/searc...
January 31, 2018
After reading Just Kids, I wanted to see his art again. What a beautiful style and after looking at his work I realize I have seen photos of his all over. So many artists use his photos. One of my favorite is Segourney Weaver. I think of it often. David Bowie used his photo as a cover as did Patti Smith.
I enjoyed the commentary at the back discussing his dual role of artist and pornographer. We was honest in the fact he wanted an artist edge to pornography or the other way around. Some of his images are brutal, some of them are beautiful and some of them move you. He simply had an eye for light and how to capture an image. He was a remarkable man and it's been nice learning more about him.
I think of this book as a beautiful well rounded body of work. He displays the parts of life that we try and pretend don't exist. This shows that life is complex and not always pretty or comfortable and there are questions about why we do things. The good, the bad and the ugly, all here, just like life.
I enjoyed the commentary at the back discussing his dual role of artist and pornographer. We was honest in the fact he wanted an artist edge to pornography or the other way around. Some of his images are brutal, some of them are beautiful and some of them move you. He simply had an eye for light and how to capture an image. He was a remarkable man and it's been nice learning more about him.
I think of this book as a beautiful well rounded body of work. He displays the parts of life that we try and pretend don't exist. This shows that life is complex and not always pretty or comfortable and there are questions about why we do things. The good, the bad and the ugly, all here, just like life.
September 15, 2007
Mapplethorpe is sadly most known for his homoerotic images which shed light on the underground (BDSM) sex scene of New York in the late 70's and early 80's. Later his work became much more commercial as he turned to taking vibrant full-color still lifes of flowers. I don't think that this in anyway however diminishes the importance of his work.
April 24, 2009
This is an amazing collection of Mapplethorpe's work. It shows the sheer breadth of his subjects and the nuance of his artistic vision.
August 6, 2017
Robert Mapplethorpe's images are so perfect that he brought photography and art to a whole new outstanding level. His need for perfection created a whole catalog of perfect photographs, which translates into a perfect body of perfect work. These images seem unreal, but they're real people. The subjects are good looking, but they're not "Hollywood perfect". They're "Mapplethorpe perfect". And that's the level of this book.
July 5, 2018
Superb.
July 29, 2011
Very beautiful photos, some of them a bit disturbing but also beautiful, which may cause you tho think. I think he was a talented photographer who had quite and axe to grind, and this collection of his work show both aspects
February 29, 2008
Awesome.........
November 4, 2013
Landmark photography, 1st and best of the oversized coffee table books. Not for children
March 11, 2012
Considering their overtly sexual nature, Mapplethorpe’s photos are surprisingly stark and emotionless. They seem more like statues than living flesh.
October 22, 2016
He was a genius.
February 20, 2017
Such a disturbing talent.
August 11, 2024
The thing that really strikes me about Mapplethorpe's art is his exquisite eye for classical composition, something that shines through just as much in his photographs of store-bought flowers and famous faces as it does with his hardcore pornographic work. If anything sums him up as an artist, it's that he's inherently a man who can divine the same amount of grace and formal beauty from a calla lily as he can a man sticking a knife into the tip of his erect penis. The tonal ranges of his prints and the perfect picturesque quality of every last one of his images rivals anyone else this side of Edward Weston. And to the eternal chagrin of the late Republican senator Jesse Helms, that collection of images includes Mapplethorpe shoving a bullwhip up his own ass in his finest leather chaps. One of the things Arthur Danto's essay really underlines about his art which I really hadn't considered before is the strikingly intimate trust evident in all of his subjects - something unfortunately rare in art photography as a whole.
The other thing that really strikes me is the masterful curation and layout of this book by Mark Holborn & Dimitri Levas. The overture of photos before the title page is an incredible implicit introduction to Mapplethorpe's style and ethos - a tattered American flag, the fleeting temporal peace of waves crashing on a shore, a marble cross half-covered by shadow, a battleship looming offshore of the Coral Sea, a black man (unnamed or credited by request, his eyes cut off by the top of the frame) with his finger squeezing the trigger of a handgun (much has rightfully been made of how much Mapplethorpe was fetishizing as opposed to honestly relating to black men in his work), then the inescapable close-up, filling two pages, of Mapplethorpe's unflinching, confrontational stare.
Some of the juxtapositions of prints in this book are genuinely incredible. A vase of baby's breath on one page playing off the white polka dots of Phyllis Tweel's dress on the next. Holocaust survivor Benno Premesela on the left staring down noted Nazi sympathizer Philip Johnson on the right, who stares impassively towards the camera, as if to ask "what are you gonna do about it?" A chrysanthemum's wild, unpredictable offshoots of petals pairs perfectly with the unkempt wig of Andy Warhol. In a perfect summary of Mapplethorpe's sexual inclinations, a couple - Larry and Bobby - are seen passionately necking on the left, coupled on the right by Frank Diaz, shirtless, muscular and gripping a steel dagger in such a way that his eyes are totally obscured by the fist clutching the blade. That dance between male romantic sexuality and the threat of masculine force is the edge Mapplethorpe plays with best over the course of his career. His hardcore BDSM work is enclosed between two bright red sheets of paper - a nod to the original publication of this work in Mapplethorpe's X catalogue. The main body of the book begins with his earliest self-portraits and ends with one of his last, where his face - visibly more gaunt and heavily aged after two years with an AIDS diagnosis - lies in the soft focus behind the camera's focal point of reference: his hand clutching a wooden cane with a skull carved on the top, literally inviting you to stare death in the face. It's powerful stuff masterfully arranged and considered.
A fitting tribute to a life's work so uncompromising in its honesty in the face of a culture that wanted it buried (figuratively and literally) that it was itself the subject of a legal challenge in 1998 when a student at Birmingham City University attempted to copy several plates included in this edition (including depictions of fisting and watersports) by photographing them and getting the film developed at a local shop, whose owners contacted the police. Despite threats of legal action if the two photographs were not removed, the university refused to budge and the book was returned by police without alteration, where it presumably resides in the library today. I'm glad it was stocked by one near me.
The other thing that really strikes me is the masterful curation and layout of this book by Mark Holborn & Dimitri Levas. The overture of photos before the title page is an incredible implicit introduction to Mapplethorpe's style and ethos - a tattered American flag, the fleeting temporal peace of waves crashing on a shore, a marble cross half-covered by shadow, a battleship looming offshore of the Coral Sea, a black man (unnamed or credited by request, his eyes cut off by the top of the frame) with his finger squeezing the trigger of a handgun (much has rightfully been made of how much Mapplethorpe was fetishizing as opposed to honestly relating to black men in his work), then the inescapable close-up, filling two pages, of Mapplethorpe's unflinching, confrontational stare.
Some of the juxtapositions of prints in this book are genuinely incredible. A vase of baby's breath on one page playing off the white polka dots of Phyllis Tweel's dress on the next. Holocaust survivor Benno Premesela on the left staring down noted Nazi sympathizer Philip Johnson on the right, who stares impassively towards the camera, as if to ask "what are you gonna do about it?" A chrysanthemum's wild, unpredictable offshoots of petals pairs perfectly with the unkempt wig of Andy Warhol. In a perfect summary of Mapplethorpe's sexual inclinations, a couple - Larry and Bobby - are seen passionately necking on the left, coupled on the right by Frank Diaz, shirtless, muscular and gripping a steel dagger in such a way that his eyes are totally obscured by the fist clutching the blade. That dance between male romantic sexuality and the threat of masculine force is the edge Mapplethorpe plays with best over the course of his career. His hardcore BDSM work is enclosed between two bright red sheets of paper - a nod to the original publication of this work in Mapplethorpe's X catalogue. The main body of the book begins with his earliest self-portraits and ends with one of his last, where his face - visibly more gaunt and heavily aged after two years with an AIDS diagnosis - lies in the soft focus behind the camera's focal point of reference: his hand clutching a wooden cane with a skull carved on the top, literally inviting you to stare death in the face. It's powerful stuff masterfully arranged and considered.
A fitting tribute to a life's work so uncompromising in its honesty in the face of a culture that wanted it buried (figuratively and literally) that it was itself the subject of a legal challenge in 1998 when a student at Birmingham City University attempted to copy several plates included in this edition (including depictions of fisting and watersports) by photographing them and getting the film developed at a local shop, whose owners contacted the police. Despite threats of legal action if the two photographs were not removed, the university refused to budge and the book was returned by police without alteration, where it presumably resides in the library today. I'm glad it was stocked by one near me.
September 19, 2018
I admire Mapplethorpe’s freedom of expression, through art and erotic imagery that was truly revolutionary at the time and still is today. I also appreciate Mapplethorpe’s use of light and dark, and his carefully constructed compositions. His photos are often much more beautiful than unsettling.
Mark Holborn’s analysis of Mapplethorpe’s work was really insightful. Holborn does an excellent job of placing Mapplethorpe in his time, as well as reflecting on his relevance today. Holborn’s discussion of composition and evaluation of subject matter, and assertion for the need to study both in Mapplethorpe’s works was really interesting in the context of it being both defended and attacked throughout its lifetime: defenders have tendencies to focus on the composition and mastery of light, the figure as a whole; while those who are opposed are offended because of their own moral proclivities, while completely ignoring the photographic achievements.
Overall, I think that Mapplethorpe’s works are an incredible window into his world. This particular collection offers an excellent example of the breadth of Mapplethorpe’s photography, not specifically focused on a single period of his work.
Mark Holborn’s analysis of Mapplethorpe’s work was really insightful. Holborn does an excellent job of placing Mapplethorpe in his time, as well as reflecting on his relevance today. Holborn’s discussion of composition and evaluation of subject matter, and assertion for the need to study both in Mapplethorpe’s works was really interesting in the context of it being both defended and attacked throughout its lifetime: defenders have tendencies to focus on the composition and mastery of light, the figure as a whole; while those who are opposed are offended because of their own moral proclivities, while completely ignoring the photographic achievements.
Overall, I think that Mapplethorpe’s works are an incredible window into his world. This particular collection offers an excellent example of the breadth of Mapplethorpe’s photography, not specifically focused on a single period of his work.
April 18, 2022
That it could have been a good candidate sub culture for a superior kind of elitism. This was the basis for the backlash against this particular artist I think. He put a certain type of stamp on things in general. And he was the equal (the counterweight) to any task he undertook.
August 9, 2016
Phoenix
April 15, 2012
Worth every dime for the photos, though the Danto essay misses so many points it's not even funny.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews