I was going through the pictures I took at the exhibition “Implicit Tensions: Mapplethorpe Now” at Guggenheim Museum in New York last February and thought of how he used his models exclusively for aesthetic purposes. This is actually what I am trying to explore with my research for the FML unit.
I rewatched the documentary “Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures” (2016) and collected a couple of quotes and images where he degrades his models to the status of a mere object.
“I’m really not a model anymore. I’m just, you know, an object” – David Croland, Mapplethorpe’s model, also his first homosexual relationship.
“I mean, that’s a sculpture to me, and that’s sort of one of the points of making photography. It’s like inventing a sculpture myself with the camera. All I know is that it’s physically attractive to me. Visually it’s also attractive” – Robert Mapplethorpe
“I don’t think it is necessary to tell you who is in the photographs because if the pictures are good then, they will transcend who they are and it wouldn’t matter” – Robert Mapplethorpe
