Since he passed away 27 years ago from an Aids-related illness, Robert Mapplethorpe’s reputation has gone from artist outlaw to sainted figure of the postwar pantheon of US photography. At the time of his death, aged 42, and for years afterwards, all anyone could talk about – and much of the talking occurred in courtrooms and under oath – was his relation to obscenity and the sexual practices of the 1970s gay liberation movement. The civic busybodies who once tormented those who exhibited Mapplethorpe’s work have vanished, and in their place has stood the sanitised figure of the photographer of nudes, flowers and society portraits, intensely controlled and inordinately delicate, at the pinnacle of his profession.
Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato want to show the totality of his life and art in Mapplethorpe: Look At The Pictures. For them that means fully addressing the most provocative and transgressive of his photos – the guy peeing in another guy’s mouth, that dude wearing a whole other dude like a wristwatch, the whip-handle and its placement – alongside his other work, and understanding them in all their contexts: sexual, social, cultural, even religious. (Look At The Pictures, indeed). Mapplethorpe, their witnesses repeatedly note, was an artist as crucially defined by his Catholicism as Scorsese, Buñuel or John Waters; his heaviest S&M material deliberately recalls the tribulations of the saints. He was also a keen and valuable documenter of the extreme gay-sex scene of the late 70s, when promiscuity still carried revolutionary overtones for a recently closeted young movement with a lot of sexual steam to blow off.
Look At The Pictures follows Mapplethorpe from his middle-class childhood in Queens as he threw himself into West Village bohemianism in the 60s and 70s. There, he honed his increasingly perfectionist technique and fed his outsized ambitions, while confronting his sexuality head-on, before and after the Aids crisis. Although the doc suffers from two serious absences – Mapplethorpe’s partner from 1967-74, Patti Smith, and the nascent photographer’s mentor, agent and lover, the late Sam Wagstaff – the directors have assembled a wide range of former lovers, models, dealers, siblings and aristocratic clients.
Mapplethorpe himself appears multi-faceted yet hard to pin down, different to each witness: the self-effacing artist on the make, the ambitious social climber, the gentle lover and the sexual pioneer, the egotist who deeply wounds his own younger brother, the man dying too young and too early to take advantage of his increasing prominence. Perhaps he was only ever who the person he was talking to needed him to be. Given all that uncertainty and elusiveness, perhaps we should just look at the pictures – no matter how startling – and find him there.