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| Robert Mapplethorpe |
| Robert Mapplethorpe photography books. Robert
Mapplethorpe was born in 1946 in Long Island. He took his first photographs
using a Polaroid camera. He wished to use his own photographic images in his
paintings, rather than pictures from magazines. “I never liked photography,”
he is quoted as saying, “Not for the sake of photography. I like the object.
I like the photographs when you hold them in your hand.” His first Polaroids
were self-portraits and the first of a series of portraits of his close
friend, the singer-artist-poet Patti Smith. These early works were shown in
groups or presented in painted frames that were as significant as the
photograph itself. The shift to photography happened during the
mid-seventies, when he acquired a large format press camera and began taking
photographs of a wide circle of friends and acquaintances. These included
artists, composers, socialites, pornographic film stars and members of the S
& M underground. Some of these photographs were shocking for their content
but exquisite in their technical mastery. During the early 1980s, his photos
began a shift toward a phase of refinement of subject and an emphasis on
classical formal beauty. During this period he concentrated on statuesque
male and female nudes, delicate flower still lifes, and formal portraits of
artists and celebrities. Mapplethorpe produced a consistent body of work
that strove for balance and perfection and established him in the top rank
of twentieth-century artists. In 1987 he established the Robert Mapplethorpe
Foundation to promote photography, support museums that exhibit photographic
art, and to fund medical research and finance projects in the fight against
AIDS and HIV-related infection. |
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