Polaroids: Mapplethorpe
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From a review of Polaroids: Mapplethorpe exhibition at the Whitney:
They represent a kind of “coming out,” artistically speaking. The mature themes of this intensely neoclassical photographer’s art are all there: still lives and self-portraiture, pictures of the demimonde and the mondaine—downtown personages, uptown celebrities, artists, socialites, and creatures of the night, who crawled before his camera from who knows where. And, of course, the great theater of eroticism, from the baroque accoutrements of gay sadomasochism—leather masks, nipple rings, penile harnesses, etc.—to tender embraces between men, to the naked mattress ticking that waits, in one photograph, like an empty page for the story of sex to be written upon it.
Robert Mapplethorpe’s Instant Precious Relics
