Robert Mapplethorpe

Robert Mapplethorpe was born in 1946 in Floral Park, Queens. In 1963, Mapplethorpe enrolled at Pratt Institute in nearby Brooklyn, where he studied drawing, painting, and sculpture. Influenced by artists such as Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp, he experimented with various materials in mixed-media collages, including images cut from books and magazines.

In 1969, he and Patti Smith, whom he had met three years earlier, moved into New York's famous Chelsea Hotel. Mapplethorpe acquired a Polaroid camera in 1970 from artist and filmmaker Sandy Daley and began producing his photographs to incorporate into the collages. His work captured his friends and acquaintances—artists, musicians, socialites, pornographic film stars, and members of the gay S & M underground. Despite his shocking content, Mapplethorpe was a formalist, interested in composition, color, texture, balance, and, most of all, beauty. In the 1980s, he concentrated on studio photography, specifically nudes, flowers, and formal portraits that are considerably more refined than his earlier work.