Volume 42, Number 18 · November 16, 1995
The Unexamined Life
By Luc Sante
Mapplethorpe
edited and designed by Mark Holborn, by Dimitri Levas, essay by Arthur C. Danto
Random House, 382 pp., $125.00
Altars
by Robert Mapplethorpe, essay by Edmund White
Random House, 128 pp., $100.00
Mapplethorpe: A Biography
by Patricia Morrisroe
Random House, 461 pp., $27.50
Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera
by Jack Fritscher Ph.D.
Hastings House, 316 pp., $24.95
Playing with the Edge: The Photographic Achievement of Robert Mapplethorpe
by Arthur C. Danto
University of California Press, 194 pp., $24.95
Robert Mapplethorpe's work is difficult to see, which is not the same thing as saying it is difficult to look at. It is certainly not difficult to view; in the six and a half years that have elapsed since Mapplethorpe's death from AIDS at the age of forty-two, it has gotten much more diffusion and publicity than it ever did during his life. But that publicity is itself one of the major reasons his work is now so difficult to see. A tangled foliage of appended context, of headlines, slogans, editorials, legal and moral and political judgments, has arisen to obstruct the sight. During his life, Mapplethorpe's photographs were judged, for better or worse, on their own merits. Since his death, or more specifically since four months so after his death, when a series of events shrouded his work in controversy and publicity, his photographs have become symbols or symptoms, even for their admirers.
Review, 5851 words
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