Robert Mapplethorpe The Photographs

"Robert Mapplethorpe: The Photographs" is an exhibition catalogue, published by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2016. It documents the joint Getty and LACMA presentation that followed the two institutions' 2011 acquisition of Mapplethorpe's archive and estate.

Curators Paul Martineau and Britt Salvesen edited the 330-page hardcover, with essays by Philip Gefter, Jonathan D. Katz, Ryan Linkof, Richard Meyer, and Carol Squiers. It surveys Mapplethorpe's full career: his early Polaroids and collages, the formal studio photography of flowers and celebrity portraits, the nude and BDSM work that drew obscenity prosecutions after his death, and his late self-portraits. The Getty showed the material as "Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium" from March 15 to July 31, 2016. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art ran a concurrent, complementary selection under the title "The Photographs" over the same dates, and the exhibition later traveled to Montreal and Sydney.

The 2011 joint acquisition brought roughly 2,000 photographs and related archival material into both museums' collections. It was the largest single body of Mapplethorpe's work held by any public institution, and this catalogue was the first major scholarly account to draw on it.