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Robert Mapplethorpe

Robert Mapplethorpe (November 4, 1946 - March 9, 1989) was an American photographer, famous 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.

Mapplethorpe was born and grew up as a Catholic in Floral Park, Long Island, New York of English and Irish extraction. He received a B.F.A. from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he produced artwork in a variety of media. Mapplethorpe took his first photographs soon thereafter, using a Polaroid camera. In the mid-1970s, he acquired a large-format press camera and began taking photographs of a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, including artists, composers, socialites, pornographic film stars, and visitors to the underground sex clubs. During the 1980s, his photographs became more refined 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.

Most of his photographs were made in his studio. His most common themes were portraits of (now) famous people (including Andy Warhol, Deborah Harry, Richard Gere, and Patti Smith), S&M-related subjects, and nude (usually homoerotic) studies. Among Mapplethorpe's most famous works was a photo of himself with a bullwhip inserted in his anus. [1] Whilst for some he is remembered for his series of closeup photographs of flowers, others prefer his portraits, his nudes and his photographs of sculptures. The sculptural photographs were his last major innovation and some have argued that they provide a way of reading his nude compositions. Mapplethorpe treated his prints like paintings; he employed special printing techniques and gave them exotic frames.

Mapplethorpe's work was regularly displayed at publicly-funded exhibitions. Many conservative and religious organizations, such as the American Family Association, however, opposed supporting his kind of art, and he became something of a cause celebre for both sides in the debate on the future of the National Endowment for the Arts. The 1990 exhibition of his The Perfect Moment show (which included seven sadomasochistic portraits) in Cincinnati resulted in the prosecution of the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center and its director Dennis Barrie on charges of "pandering obscenity". Barrie and the CCAC were subsequently acquitted. The political controversy surrounding his work has subsequently abated which has enabled a cooler appraisal of the aesthetic quality of his works to be undertaken. The central appeal to compositional quality in his photographs marks them out as quite distinct from many overly political works produced in the 1970s and 1980s which often eschewed precisely such an approach to art works. In reinventing precisely the appeal to such aesthetic considerations the artistic impact of his work may yet prove more of more durable significance than the political controversy.

Mapplethorpe died from complications arising from AIDS at the age of 42 in 1989 in Boston, Massachusetts.