Robert Mapplethorpe was one of the most famous and controversial figures in the contemporary art world. His photographs were often praised for their beauty, and were often condemned for their explicit sexuality. Mapplethorpe was, ultimately, to choose a homosexual lifestyle, though he has intense sexual relationships with rock stars like Patti Smith, the first subject of his first series of portraits (Biography, 2007). One aspect of Mapplethorpe's large body of work included his fascination with the use of ethnic males as central figures. This analysis will use three images of ethnic males photographer by Mapplethorpe to show how the style of his work related to the period in which it was created.
Mapplethorpe became enmeshed in the throes of what he himself called "black fever" in 1980, when he began to claim that white males no longer interested him sexually (Morrisroe, 1995, p. 233). Mapplethorpe's decision to photography black men made him extremely particular about the quality of his prints and more focused than ever on developing a perfected dark room technique. One of Mapplethorpe's exhibits, "Black Males," consisted of twenty photographic images of young, black men - many of them nude and endowed with muscular bodies and generously proportioned sexual organs (Morrisroe, 1995, p. 253). Created during the Reagan era when homosexuals, blacks, and artists generally suffered from conservative policies and a backlash against homosexuals due to the advent of AIDS, Mapplethorpe's images were intended to shock as well as raise photography to a fine art. One of his most popular models was Ken Moody.
In describing his fascination with the male body, Mapplethorpe considered black muscular males to exhibit the same qualities as bronze or marble, qualities evident in the statue-like image of Moody above.
Robert Hughes (1992) maintains that Mapplethorpe "deliberately" set out to sho
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