Robert Mapplethorpe

Robert Mapplethorpe was born in 1946 in Queens. He died in 1989 at the young age of 42. Mapplethorpe went to college at Pratt Institute where he studied drawing, painting, and sculpting. He first got into photography in 1970 when he was given his first Polaroid camera. He used those photos in collages that he liked to make. Five years later he got a Hasselblad medium format camera which he used to begin taking pictures of his friends and acquaintances. He also used it to work on commercial projects, cover art for albums, and pictures for Interview Magazine. Mapplethorpe produced photos that both challenged and adhered to the classical aesthetic standards throughout the 1980s. He was diagnosed with AIDS in 1986. However, this did not stop him, instead, it gave him a reason to work harder. He accelerated his creative efforts, widened his scope of photographic inquiry, and accepted increasingly challenging commissions. Just a year before his death the Whitney Museum of American Art ‘mounted his first major American museum retrospective’. He also established the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation in 1988 to ‘promote photography, support museums that exhibit photographic art, and to find medical research in the fight against AIDS and HIV’.


As I explained in one of my previous blogs I prefer nature photography, however, Mapplethorpe was able to use the bland background as a way to exhibit the intricate beauty of the flowers in his still-life photography. When it comes to his still-life’s he is one of my favorite photographers. Sadly, Mapplethorpe died too young. Had he lived longer he could have been one of the greatest progressive photographers of his time. However, if it was not for his terminal illness he may not have pushed himself as hard toward the end. So you could say that his illness was both a blessing and a curse. 



Exhibit-E.com. (n.d.). Biography. Retrieved November 09, 2020, from http://www.mapplethorpe.org/biography/

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