MAPPLETHORPE Robert
BIBLIOGRAPHY ARTWORKS
Robert Mapplethorpe was born in 1946 in Queens, New York. One of six children, he was brought up in a strict Catholic environment. When he was sixteen he enrolled at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he studied drawing, painting, and sculpture.
Early in his career Robert Mapplethorpe was influenced by a range of artists including assemblage artist Joseph Cornell and dada artist Marcel Duchamp. He experimented with mixed media collages, using images cut from books and magazines.
In 1970 he bought a Polaroid camera so he could take photographs to use in his collages. But he began to appreciate the quality of Polaroid photographs in their own right and his first solo exhibition, in 1973 at the Light Gallery in New York City, was called Polaroids. Two years later Mapplethorpe bought a more sophisticated camera, a Hasselblad medium format camera, and began photographing the people he knew. Artists, musicians, pornographic film stars, and other members of the edgy New York underground scene were all captured on Mapplethorpe's camera.