Robert Mapplethorpe: Portraits

Robert Mapplethorpe: Portraits is the catalogue for a 2009 exhibition at Palm Springs Art Museum devoted specifically to Mapplethorpe's studio portraiture, a body of work usually read in the shadow of his flowers and figure studies.

Published without a dust jacket and printed in black and white throughout, the book gathers portraits from across his career with an essay by Gordon Baldwin and additional text by Daniell Cornell. It tracks the sitters, the poses, and the formal control that carried into his portrait work the same rigor he applied to still life: direct gazes, plain grounds, sculptural lighting. The exhibition traveled from Palm Springs (January-April 2009) to the Tucson Museum of Art (summer 2009) and the San Jose Museum of Art (fall 2010).

Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) trained at Pratt Institute before moving from mixed-media collage into photography in the early 1970s. Working first in Polaroid, he built a reputation through studio portraits, flowers, and explicit documentation of New York's S&M subculture that drew both acclaim and censorship fights. The Whitney Museum mounted his first major American retrospective in 1988, the year before his death from AIDS-related illness. The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, which he established that same year, now maintains his archive and supports museum photography programs and HIV/AIDS research.