The most influential man in photography history

In our advanced technology era, everyone has a camera, therefore everyone who is more or less advanced in using this technology is an artist.😂 But there were times when photography wasn't considered as "serious" art. And the man who brought photography to a totally new level was Rober Mapplethorpe. I absolutely love his work and everything he did. His photographs give me shivers. It touches me deeply and in every polaroid of his, I feel the true stories behind.

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​Mapplethorpe studied drawing, painting, and sculpture at Pratt Institute in nearby Brooklyn. Influenced by Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp, he experimented with various materials in mixed-media collages, including images cut from books and magazines. But his photographer path started in 1970 when he acquired a Polaroid camera from artist and filmmaker Sandy Daley and began producing his own photographs to incorporate into the collages, saying he felt "it was more honest." By that time he was with another remarkable person Patti Smith and they moved together into the Chelsea Hotel.

As an example of his polaroid works, I suggest you this book and few scanned pages of it.

I know that for some people this photographs might be insulting and shocking for their content, but as a photographer and an artist, I am absolutely astonished by remarkable technical and formal mastery.

Mapplethorpe himself described his art with words "I don't like that particular word 'shocking.' I'm looking for the unexpected. I'm looking for things I've never seen before … I was in a position to take those pictures. I felt an obligation to do them."

The photo of Sam Wagstaff, his lover. You can almost feel their love when you see pictures of Sam.

And this is for sure unexpected, honest, truthful. He simply intruded in the world of art saying "from now and on photography is a high art".

So exactly Robert Mapplethorpe brought photography there. But at which cost...sometimes when I see lives of genius people it seems to me that they paid a high cost for that. Robert Mapplethorpe died at the age of 42 due to complications from HIV/AIDS.

Picture 1 ​ https://www.dailyscandinavian.com/robert-mapplethorpe-exhibitions-in-oslo

Picture 2 ​ http://mapplethorpe.la/assets/cms/images/NewYork_3_gm_24756301.jpg