Happy Nude Year (Day 3)
Here’s a photograph called Double Jack in the Pulpit by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
And here’s one called Derrick Cross.
The delicacy of Mapplethorpe’s flowers are in stark contrast to the physical strength of his chosen models, but his ability to draw out intense intimacy in both is what made him famous. And infamous.
Mapplethorpe’s technique as a photographer is irrefutable. However, his subject matter — ranging from orchids to the New York S&M scene of the 1970s — is so controversial it got him censored up until the day he died… and beyond.
In 1991, two years after he died at the age of 42 from AIDS, the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati exhibited The Perfect Moment, a collection of seven photographs that had already been rejected by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in D.C. because they depicted “explicit acts.” At the urging of Citizens for Community Values, Hamilton County prosecutors charged the gallery and its director with pandering obscenity. Both were acquitted on all counts… and the Contemporary Art Center saw a dramatic increase and membership and was able to move into a new building in the heart of downtown.
Like it or not, Mapplethorpe’s photographs always get attention. Sexually charged yet starkly honest, his work, he said in an interview with ARTnews in 1988, doesn’t qualify as shocking.
“I don’t like that particular word ‘shocking,’” he said. “I’m looking for the unexpected. I’m looking for things I’ve never seen before … I was in a position to take those pictures. I felt an obligation to do them.”
Tomorrow we visit Imogen Cunningham, a photographer who, like Mapplethorpe, focused her lens on people and plants.
[...] away the nude’s neutrality and made the image of the naked body explicitly sexual and erotic; and Robert Mapplethorpe, because he paved the way for the contemporary explorations of the body as a site of homoerotic [...]