HE WAS duly invited to participate but even then, his friend and muse Patti Smith recollects, he never wasted a single sheet of film - though it was coming free from Polaroid. It was an attitude to technique and craft he maintained throughout, until his early death from complications arising from AIDS. Mapplethorpe died on the morning of March 9, 1989, in a Boston hospital; he was 42 years old.
There have been previous books on these early works by Mapplethorpe, notably Arena Editions’ Autoportrait in 2003, a collection of monochrome self portraits from 1971-73. But here, Sylvia Wolf has carried out extensive research in the archives of the RM Foundation to unearth Mapplethorpe’s earliest experiments with the [then] new Polaroid 360 camera. Although the first Polaroid camera had been released as early as 1948, with commercial models prevalent in the 1960s (like the Swinger) the 360 ‘Land Camera’ (1969-1971) was only eclipsed when the SX-70 marked the birth of the true ‘instant’ colour picture in 1972.
Born a Roman Catholic, Robert’s homosexuality - and the polarising effect this would have had on his psyche - informed his art throughout. Mapplethorpe’s early 3D artworks were Pop Art constructions, combined with homoerotic photographic images. He never lost an intense interest in the gay magazines masquerading as expressions of ‘physical culture’, indeed, as a 16 year old, he had once been caught stealing one from a newsagent in Times Square. Much later, his creative totem was to be Benjamin Green, the pornographic film star, as he told the New York Times: ‘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’. When Mapplethorpe acquired a large format press camera in the mid-1970s, his work would evolve into the study of statuesque male and female nudes, delicate flower still-lifes, and formal portraits of artists and celebrities. However, the extremes of homoerotic S&M culture, which so fascinated Robert, would be the source of controversy and legal confrontations throughout the whole of his time as an artist.
Sylvia Wolf identifies all the ingredients of Mapplethorpe’s later themes in these early Polaroid ‘notebooks’. She provides a scholarly essay placing Mapplethorpe firmly within the canon of 20th century art, that encompasses not only the obvious (Larry Clark, Diane Arbus, E.J. Bellocq) but extends references to painters like Egon Schiele, Durer and Mantegna. She is also at pains to identify and annotate the technical processes Mapplethorpe used create each individual image. Presented in a slip case with window, Prestel’s book of 183 early Polaroid works by Robert Mapplethorpe is already looking like a classic. A work with hidden depths.
