The name Robert Mapplethorpe conjures up cool, slick, faultless photographs of the human body, rendered in marmoreal black and white. It also connotes the explicit but exquisitely composed X-rated pictures that excited intense political scrutiny in the early 1990s. What the name does not usually suggest is tenderness, imperfection, or spontaneity – which is why the Whitney’s small but packed little show of the photographer’s early Polaroids comes as such a welcome shock.
Many of these instant photos have never been shown, and the rest only rarely; together they reveal in Mapplethorpe a very different sensibility, one that had yet to form its mature, glistening carapace. Here, naked men lounge on rumpled sheets or pose on scarred wood floors, but they have not yet achieved the serenely masculine magnificence he would give them later on. They are friends, lovers and colleagues – people, in other words, rather than ravishing arrangements of long, lean limbs.
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These early portraits of himself and [Patti] Smith project a sense of looseness and a willingness to be driven by his subject’s whims, by shifts in light, and forces outside his control. He turned his camera towards the world beyond the regulated environment of his apartment/studio, catching moody glimpses of the city at night, surreal shop windows, and sculptures that flaunted forms of timeless grace.
Mapplethorpe’s classical bent was there at the start, but in the earliest Polaroids he inflected it with Hellenistic drama. A Greek bust, for instance, enters the picture at one corner, thrusting diagonally into the frame. The sense of movement doesn’t inhere in the sculpture itself, but is injected through Mapplethorpe’s asymmetrical composition. Here, he opted for theatrical verve, subjugating a preference for symmetry that would later become an obsession.
The FT on Polaroids: Mapplethrope that’s running at the Whitney Museum, New York, until September.
Related: The Patti Smith Retrospective at the Fondation Cartier, as taken in by R.E.M.
First posted: Friday, May 30th, 2008.
