Robert Mapplethorpe

In the 1970’s Robert Mapplethorpe started to take an interest in photography, collecting old photographs. Initially he only made montages from photographs that he found, but in 1972 he began to take pictures with a Polaroid camera. The Holly Solomon Gallery label on the reverse of this print's frame,suggests that it may have been shown in the gallery's Portraits exhibition in 1977, one of Mapplethorpe's earliest one-man exhibitions. Mapplethorpe had his first exhibitions of gelatin silver photographs in 1977 (Light Gallery exhibited his Polaroids in 1973), before he had instituted a system for editioning, marking, or signing his prints. It is not unusual to see unmarked photographs from this early phase of the photographer's career. Mapplethorpes preferred motifs where classical themes such as still-life scenes, flowers, portraits and nudes. All of which he recorded in rigorous compositions with an extremely precise photographic style. He caused a sensation in particular with his nudes, which defined eroticism and homosexuality with a virtually relentless arrogance.