Mapplethorpe was born and grew up as a Roman Catholic in Our Lady of the Snows Parish in Floral Park, Long Island, New York, of English and Irish heritage. He earned a B.F.A. from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, 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, but it wasn't until he met Benjamin Green the pornographic film star, that he truly became inspired to push the envelope of sexuality and photographing the human body. Mapplethorpe was once quoted as saying, "Of all the men and women that I had the pleasure of photographing, Ben Green was the apple of my eye, my unicorn if you will. I could shoot him for hours and hours and no matter the position, each print captured the complete essence of human perfection"(New York Times). It was this relationship that inspired him during the 1980s, to refine his photographs 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.
His work
Mapplethorpe made most of his photographs in the studio. His most common themes were flowers, especially orchids; portraits of famous people, including Andy Warhol, Deborah Harry, Richard Gere, Peter Gabriel, Grace Jones, and Patti Smith (Patti Smith's portrait was inspired by Durer's 1500 self-portrait) and nude works that include homoerotic imagery spanning classic nude forms to S&M acts. Mapplethorpe is best known for his Portfolio X series, which sparked national attention because of its explicit content and the funding of the effort by the NEA, including a self-portrait with a bullwhip inserted in his anus. He also photographed African-American men in ways that have been deemed tantalizing and racist.
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 National Endowment for the Arts funding debate. His The Perfect Moment exhibit in 1990 which included seven sadomasochistic portraits in Cincinnati resulted in the unsuccessful prosecution of the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center and its director Dennis Barrie on charges of "pandering obscenity".
This controversy was not accidental, as Mapplethorpe intended to use his unquestionable skills as a classic photographer to show gay sexuality as beautiful: it is activist art. Mapplethorpe's work functions in a postmodern sense on many levels and raises a variety of questions regarding the lexicon of the classic male nude and its tie to sexuality, the role and construction of gender and sexuality in our society, the role of form and content in traditional and contemporary art, the communicative aspect of imagery, and censorship issues regarding museum space, tax dollars, and, in a general sense, all imagery.
When it became known that Mapplethorpe was infected with HIV, the prices for his photos increased dramatically. In December 1988 his photos collected $500,000 each. Mapplethorpe died on the morning of March 9, 1989, in a Boston, Massachusetts hospital from complications arising from AIDS; he was 42 years old. His ashes were buried in Queens, New York, in his mother's grave, marked 'Maxey'.
In 2003, Arena Editions published Autoportrait, a collection of black and white Polaroid self-portraits that Mapplethorpe took between 1971 and 1973. This was the first time these early works became available for widespread viewing since the 1970s.
In 2006, a Mapplethorpe print of Andy Warhol was auctioned $643,200, making it the 6th most expensive photograph ever sold.
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