Robert Mapplethorpe
[Photographer, b. 1946, Floral Park, Long Island, d. 1989, Boston, Massachusetts.]
I went into photography because it seemed like the perfect vehicle for commenting on the madness of today’s existence.
Ever since I started taking pictures, I’ve photographed sex of one kind or another.
I never liked photography. Not for the sake of photography. I like the object. I like the photographs when you hold them in your hand.
If I had been born one or two hundred years ago, I might have been a sculptor, but photography is a very quick way to see, to make sculpture.
If I am at a party, I want to be at the party. Too many photographers use the camera to avoid participating in things. They become professional observers.
I would see a young kid walking down 42nd Street and then go into a magazine storefront, which were places I didn’t know anything about. I became obsessed with going into them and seeing what was inside those magazines. They were all sealed, which made them even sexier somehow, because you couldn’t get at them. A kid gets a certain kind of reaction, which of course when you’ve been exposed to everything you don’t get. I got that feeling in my stomach, it’s not a directly sexual one, it’s something more potent than that. I though if I could somehow bring that element into art, if I could somehow retain that feeling, I would be doing something that was uniquely my own.
With photography, you zero in; you put a lot of energy into short periods, short moments, and then you go on to the next thing. It seems to allow you to function in a very contemporary way and still produce material.
People don’t have time to wait for someone to paint their portrait anymore.
(1977)
