"I want people to see my works first as art and second as
photography." Robert Mapplethorpe.

Robert Mapplethorpe was born in 1946, in Long Island. He received a B.F.A. from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he produced artwork in a variety of media. His first photographs using a Polaroid camera were self-portraits and the first of a series of portraits of his close friend, the singer-artist-poet Patti Smith. During the mid-seventies. He acquired a large format press camera and began taking photographs of a wide circle of friends and acquaintances. These included artists, composers, socialites, pornographic film stars and members of the homosexual underground, as well as Lisa Lyon, the world's first World Champion of Female Bodybuilding, who he met in 1980 and with whom he went on to collaborate on the book Lady. The graphic nature of many of his photos, particularly those depicting sadomasochistic scenes, were shocking for their content but exquisite in their technical mastery. Mapplethorpe told ARTnews in late 1988, "I don't like that particular word -shocking? I'm looking for the unexpected. I'm looking for things I've never seen before. I was in a position to take those pictures. I felt an obligation to do them." Some of these works continue to cause a great deal of controversy up to today.

During the early 1980s, Mapplethorpe's photographs began a shift toward a phase of refinement of subject and an emphasis on classical formal beauty. During this period he concentrated on statuesque male and female nudes, delicate flower still lifes, and formal portraits of artists and celebrities. He continued to challenge the definition of photography by introducing new techniques and formats to his oeuvre: color Polaroids, photogravure, platinum prints on paper and linen, Cibachomes and dye transfer color prints, as well as his earlier black-and-white gelatin silver prints.

Mapplethorpe's photographs show a fascination with questions of iconography and intimacy. He manages to convey both a physical and emotional closeness to his subjects and yet creates a sense of detachment at the same time.

Mapplethorpe produced a consistent body of work that strove for balance and perfection and established him in the top rank of twentieth-century artists. In 1987, he established the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation to promote photography, support museums that exhibit photographic art, and to fund medical research and finance projects in the fight against AIDS and HIV-related infection. In 1988, 1 year before his death from complications due to AIDS, he had his first retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.