Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures

Abstract

In March 2016, twinned retrospectives of Robert Mapplethorpe's lifework, focused on his photographic output, opened at the Getty Center and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In Mapplethorpe, Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato use that occasion as an impetus to recount the artist's biography. Those unfamiliar with Mapplethorpe's work will be exposed to a solid overview of the artist and become intimate with his most celebrated images. To its credit, the film intelligently, even wittily, repeatedly returns to the same sexually provocative images, allowing viewers to—pardon the phrasing—take them in without retarding the film's momentum (although the ominous music accompanying the rapid montages suggests that the images are simply frightening, which endangers Mapplethorpe's agenda). The film, though, is not as interested in the pictures as its title suggests, instead focusing on Mapplethorpe's psychology. In this regard, the filmmakers share in the avowed project of the exhibitioners, who state in the film that they aim to “humanize” Mapplethorpe—although they do not specify exactly to whom he might be inhuman. Perhaps it is to the likes of the uberconservative senator Jesse Helms, whose 1989 Senate rant to “look at the pictures!” opens the film, and is appropriated in its title. If so, we might well question this goal from the outset.