George’s Reviews > The Photographer's Truth > Status Update

For a long time after college, my life existed in binary. Black or white. On or off. It was either one thing or it was not. No grey areas. No blur. I had created a life built on simplicity. For me, simplicity was elegance. I never thought back to that night in Hotel 17 with Vince and it never occurred to me that my need for the certainty of a black and white world might somehow be connected to it.

I felt like I had never really witnessed passion and loneliness before that moment. The powerful black and white images, the ghost of hope in the men’s faces, the way Mapplethorpe captured a split second in time and used it to illustrate love and lust and loneliness and comfort all at once - it was a revelation to me.

The first few sentences of an exceptional novel capture the reader's attention and set the tone for everything that follows. These first two intriguing sentences that open Ralph Josiah Bardsley’s ‘The Photographer’s Truth’ do just that.

“The first time I saw a Mapplethorpe print, I was twenty years old. It was my junior year in college, and I had gone with my roommate to New York City on spring break.”