Mapplethorpe Polaroids

Critically praised for his finely modeled and classically composed photographs, Robert Mapplethorpe remains intensely controversial and enormously popular. This book brings together almost three hundred images from the Robert Mapplethorpe foundation's archive and private collections, to provide a critical view of Mapplethorpe's formative years as an artist. These works reveal the themes that would inspire Mapplethorpe throughout his career. Included is a selection of his color Polaroids and objects incorporating his early "instant" photography. Some images convey a disarming tenderness and vulnerability, others a toughness and immediacy that would give way in later years to more classical form. The author traces the development of Mapplethorpe's use of instant photography during a period of five years from 1970 to 1975, when the artist worked mainly in this medium.