“Pictures,” an insightful work of biographical criticism, puts the controversial photographer’s works in the context of a life and artistic vision, writes a New York Times reviewer.
Every generation gets its own “New York values” panic. The HBO documentary on the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (which premiered April 4) begins in 1989, months after his death, with Sen. Jesse Helms decrying his work on the floor of the U.S. Senate. The senator had started a crusade against the National Endowment for the Arts’ funding of an exhibition by “a known homosexual who died of AIDS,” whose work included graphic depictions of sex and S-and-M. “Look at the pictures!” he cried.
“Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures,” directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, does just that. But where Helms meant to point to the photographs’ content — the skin, the genitalia, the placement of a bullwhip or a fist — “Pictures,” an insightful work of biographical criticism, puts them in the context of a life and artistic vision. It finds the light behind the heat.
“Pictures” lays out a straightforward narrative of Mapplethorpe’s life, starting with his Roman Catholic childhood in New York. (One of his first works is a Picasso-esque portrait of the Virgin Mary.) When he was an art student, photography was considered as much craft as art. As Philip Gefter, a photography critic and a former picture editor at The New York Times, says in the film, the genre would gain stature concurrently with the gay rights movement.
Mapplethorpe connected art and arousal early on, experimenting with collages using stills from gay pornography magazines. Bailey and Barbato deftly reproduce his vision, showing how he edited the images, adding color and form, recalling both contemporary geometric art and classical sculpture.
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These early works anticipate his most famous photos — sampled generously in the film — that could be rawly sexual and cool as marble. In an archival interview, Mapplethorpe likens his work to “being a sculptor without having to spend all the time modeling with your hands.”
The filmmakers capture his rise from every angle, using the artist’s own words and interviewing dozens of family members, friends, peers, models and lovers. (They also spend time with the curators of a retrospective that just opened in Los Angeles.) His contemporaries remember an ambitious, seductive man, charismatic, open and calculating. “He looked like a kind of ruined Cupid, and he was very reliant on his charm,” recalls the writer Fran Lebowitz. “He made great use of it.”
Even Mapplethorpe’s admirers say he could be deeply competitive and jealous. His younger brother Edward, a photographer himself, recalls Mapplethorpe insisting he use a professional pseudonym (“Edward Maxey”). But the subject is also far from the leering pornographer drawn by Helms.
In a way, the film suggests that Helms was not entirely wrong, insofar as Mapplethorpe’s photos aren’t not about sex — some of his models were also his lovers. But they aren’t only about sex, either. They’re about composition and form — just as his portraits and his striking still-lifes of flowers were. They were often the product of his Catholic upbringing, echoing scenes of martyred saints. They’re works of eros and art and life, from an artist who drew little distinction among them.
The film doesn’t editorialize much, about the work or the controversy, but its title says enough. It is at least in part thanks to Helms that this film looks at Mapplethorpe’s pictures and gives them a frame.