MAPPLE SYRUP part one.

Mapplethorpe was best known for his photography but began with a collection of mixed media collages created from scraps and reused photographs from magazines. He later decided he wished to use his own photography within his work. This is when he obtained a Polaroid SX-70 camera, with which he would take self-portraits and portraits of love interest Patti Smith. Even the mixed-media work was suggestive of sexual repression, featuring scraps of pornographic magazines. Before turning to fine art based photography, Mapplethorpe becomes a photographer for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine and this introduced him to the celebrity circuit and him shooting the likes of John Paul Getty III. During this time he also created and shot album covers for Patti Smith.

In Robert Mapplethorpe’s work, especially his early pieces, it is particularly hard to pinpoint a meaning behind the work, compared to his later pieces. For example, in the piece ‘The Sea’, one of the few pictures Mapplethorpe has taken in which the subject cannot physically be manoeuvred and posed to his liking. While there is a large body of work to look at, selecting the most potent and ‘shocking’ to the viewer will are the areas most significant to study. Equally interesting is the media frenzy itself and the reaction of his fans and fellow artists after his death. It is said that photography as an art form is painting with light. Mapplethorpe was less concerned with seeing the light: the negatives were much more appealing as they portrayed the darkness in his subjects. He discarded the real and embraced the unreal. He would take the subjects out of the world they were found in and give them back an original meaning, rather than the standard socialised one. Flowers, figures and faces, three of Mapplethorpe are most relevant and talked about images. The flower to re-establish strength and sexuality within them, within the figures was to give dignity to male and female genitals and within the faces and portraits giving the person themselves identity back.  In doing this it made us look at things we wouldn’t have before, giving the subject a deeper meaning and understand visuals we would usually pass by.