Robert Mapplethorpe

I first learned of Robert Mapplethorpe through watching his documentary in my Advanced Photography class. The professor played it in the background while we were doing busy work. I was honestly more focused on my work than on what was being shown most of the time, doing more listening than watching. When pictures from Project X came up, everybody stopped what they were doing and gaped at the image on the screen: a hand up a man’s ass. The male student next to me laughed nervously and said,”Oh. My. God.” I was astonished too, I have never seen photography as explicit as that in my whole life. I think I had never thought that art could be so blunt and upfront. 

From then on, I greatly admire Mapplethorpe conceptually and technically. Conceptually for setting new boundaries in art for controversial topics such as sexual desire, beauty and the private activities of homosexual men. In my opinion, his art not only intrigues a marginal audience. His photography captures the eye of any beholder, not just because of what he is depicting but how he depicts it. Which brings me to how I admire how he makes his art technically. I feel that Mapplethorpe’s photography applies to what we are learning in class because we’ve been talking about chiaroscuro and learning the whip-out method of painting. Mapplethorpe’s use of chiaroscuro in photography is similar to that of Caravaggio in painting. Both artist’s present their subjects with dramatically, a trait that Baroque art is known for. For example, in Caravaggio's David with the Head of Goliath, the background is completely dark and David seems to emerge from the darkness almost suspended in a dark void, alone with the head of Goliath. His subjects also, for the most part have a austare plainness to them, as if these are people Caravaggio often see in one of his dingy pubs. He also uses the lighting to accentuate and capture the disgusted expression on David’s face, creating an, in the moment, stage-like performance. In a way, this is similar in the way Mapplethorpe presents subjects as objects, a living sculpture that he could light and position in any way he likes. It gives his photos a theater-like sense too. The subjects might be considered mundane, private, or hard to look at, subjects pertaining to his own life style, but he presents them in a larger than life way. He uses chiaroscuro to accentuate his subjects’ body with a high contrast of light and dark. Especially, in his photos of the male body, he uses lighting to not only define the muscles and bones in completely white or black bodies, he would also set them against a completely dark or light background. Technically, the way he plays with black and white and lighting on the human body, and conceptually, the way he presents beauty, interests me. There is an honesty and sincerity that in Mapplethorpe's work that I also wish to achieve in my own art.