Mapplethorpe at the Art Gallery of New South Wales

I wandered up to the AG NSW yesterday and had a look at the Mapplethorpe exhibition that is on. A few weeks ago I had gone to a talk held at the gallery led by curator Isobel Parker Philip with the participation of contemporary Australian photographers Samuel Hodge, Paul Knight and Spence Messih, that was held to complement the exhibition. That talk was interesting but a bit unfocused, but yesterday I saw the actual photos of the famous American photographer on the walls. Here are a few of them (you are able to take photos of the photographs as long as you don’t use a flash).

‘Dominick and Elliot’, 1979. This is a sadomasochistic picture showing a man upside down strapped to a crucifix. Another man has his arm between the restrained man’s legs, his hand cradling the upside-down man’s genitals. The standing man has short hair and a hairy chest, and the hair on the restrained man is also a feature of the work.

A photo of a bruised Catherine Milinaire (1976) is as direct and unadorned as the more famous photos of Patti Smith. This photo has a history behind it. The text accompanying the photo tells the story: During a visit to Paris, Mapplethorpe organised to take photos of the American actor Denis Hopper, who was living with fashion editor Catarine Milinaire. Mapplethorpe socialised with the couple at their apartment and arrived there the next day and found it in disarray. Milinaire was hiding in the bathroom, her face “battered and bruised”. She agreed to have her photograph taken “to expose the reality of violence against women and its prevalence, irrespective of socio-economic status”.

There is also a photo of Mapplethorpe’s mentor John McKendry dated 1975 which is wry, showing a half portrait of the man’s face next to wall sockets. A 1981 photo of Deborah Harry has a severe directness to it as the young rocker looks straight at the camera, unflinchingly. ‘Nick’, 1977, shows a young man with tattoos and a full beard staring at the camera over his shoulder. Over his shoulder the young man holds a leather jacket and he wears a studded belt.

Photo of Marcus Leatherdale, 1978, shows a naked young man, his body facing to the right but his face looking directly at the camera over his left shoulder. Over his shoulder the man has draped a dead rabbit. The corpse’s cotton tail is situated precisely adjacent the man’s nose. Another photo is a photo of Alice Neel, dated 1984, which shows an elderly woman with her eyes closed and her mouth open. Her white wispy hair is not completely in order and you can see the top of her bottom teeth.

‘Calla lily’, 1986 has the flower caught in a bright light that comes from directly above the subject. The flower’s shadow looks like a wisp of smoke trailing away to the shadow of the stem.

‘Ron Simms’, 1980. A naked backside with the man’s hand falling relaxed next to his upper thigh, with the man facing to the left. The sheen and lustre of black skin. The light is coming from the left, so the shadow of the man’s arm falls across his left buttock, incising for the viewer the contour of the gluteus maximus.

‘Grapes’, 1985. The dark fruit hangs from a point outside the frame. There are two light sources. One light source is from in front and above. The second light source is from below. The grapes look like they are carved from granite.

The more risqué photos are kept in a separate room, off to the side of the main gallery that has been set up, and there is a guide stationed at the entrance. I asked her if she was there to keep the kids out and she told me, with a smile, it was to, “Answer any questions people have.” These photos are hung in a different way, all in rows (as shown below), rather than individually, as are the other photos in the exhibition. Along the other wall in this small gallery are examples of the original albums that were used to publish these parts of Mapplethorpe’s opus.

To accompany the exhibition, there is a book available in the gallery shop which was published by the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, which is the source of the photos in the exhibition. The book was published in 2016 with text by Paul Martineau and Britt Salvesen. You can buy the book and read their introduction if you want more information about Mapplethorpe’s life. What comes across in the exhibition of the works, however, is that Mapplethorpe was an artist in a hurry. It only took about 10 years from the mid-70s to the mid-80s for the photographer to cement his legacy, and to take the majority of the photographs that would go on to make him famous. He died in 1989, at the height of the AIDS crisis, after he had achieved material success.