Born Today in 1946: Photographer Robert Mapplethorpe

Robert Mapplethorpe was born today, November 4, in 1946. He was a controversial photographer whose work featured an array of subjects, including celebrity portraits, graphic male and female nudes, self-portraits, and still-life images of flowers, often times in black and white.

Mapplethorpe lived with his close friend Patti Smith from 1967 to 1972, and she supported him by working in bookstores. They created art together, and maintained a close relationship. 

Mapplethorpe took his first photographs in the late 1960s or early 1970s using a Polaroid camera. In 1972 he met art curator Sam Wagstaff who would become his mentor and lifetime companion. In the mid-1970s Wagstaff acquired a Hasselblad medium-format camera and Mapplethorpe began taking photographs of a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, including artists, composers, and socialites. During this time, he became friends with New Orleans artist George Dureau, whose work had a profound impact on Mapplethorpe, so much so that he restaged many of Dureau's early photographs. From 1977 until 1980, Mapplethorpe was the lover of writer and Drummer magazine editor Jack Fritscher who introduced him to Mineshaft, a BDSM gay bar and sex club in New York City.

Mapplethorpe died on the morning of March 9, 1989, at the age of 42 due to complications from HIV/AIDS.

Nearly a year before his death, the ailing Mapplethorpe helped found the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Inc. His vision for the Foundation was that it would be "the appropriate vehicle to protect his work, to advance his creative vision, and to promote the causes he cared about." Since his death, the Foundation has not only functioned as his official estate and helped promote his work throughout the world, but it has also raised and donated millions of dollars to fund medical research in the fight against AIDS and HIV infection.

Mapplethorpe worked primarily in a studio, and almost exclusively in black and white, with the exception of some of his later work and his final exhibit "New Colors." His body of work features a wide range of subjects, but his main focus and the greater part of his work is erotic imagery. He would refer to some of his own work as pornographic, with the aim of arousing the viewer, but which could also be regarded as high art. His erotic art explored a wide range of sexual subjects, depicting the BDSM subculture of New York in the 1970s, portrayals of black male nudes, and classical nudes of female bodybuilders. Mapplethorpe was a participant observer for much of his erotic photography, participating in the sexual acts which he was photographing and engaging his models sexually.

In the summer of 1989, Mapplethorpe's traveling solo exhibit brought national attention to the issues of public funding for the arts, as well as questions of censorship and the obscene. The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., had agreed to be one of the host museums for the tour. Mapplethorpe decided to show his latest series that he explored shortly before his death. Titled Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment, the show included photographs from his X Portfolio, which featured images of urophagia, BDSM, and a self-portrait with a bullwhip inserted in his anus.

The show was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The cancellation of the show was due to the fact that the museum did not want to get involved in the politics. Instead, the Corcoran was pulled into the controversy, which "intensified the debate waged both in the media and in Congress surrounding the NEA's funding of projects perceived by some individuals... to be inappropriate..." The hierarchy of the Corcoran and several members of the U.S. Congress were upset when the works were revealed to them, due the homoerotic and sadomasochistic themes of some of the work. 

Though much of his work throughout his career had been regularly displayed in publicly funded exhibitions, conservative and religious organizations, such as the American Family Association, seized on this exhibition to vocally oppose Government support for what they called "nothing more than the sensational presentation of potentially obscene material."

Click on the images below to see more of Mapplethorpe's art.