In Mapplethorpe's photographs, the world of inorganic form is
absent save as it is defined by the organic. What we think of as
Leonard's circle, and Leonardo's square inscribed within it, are
evoked by many of the astonishing bodies, astonishingly posed in
Black Book(1986), and indeed the geometry of these
cherished figures is insistently caressed by deliberate and
theatrical lighting, by occasional props of flowers - the sheaf
of six calla lilies held by
Dennis Speight,
1983, alludes to a potential orgasmic flowering, a sort of
seminal bouquet - and by the photographer's repeated assertion
that it is the bodies of black men which will take the light,
and the darkness, with the most resolute formal
determination. In most instances, Mapplethorpe's images of the
male nude are isolated, solitary. Exceptionally the drama is
offered as dialogue (an embrace, an agon between parallel black
and white forms)
[Thomas and Dovana];
characteristically, the "subject" is a lyric
efflorescence within the intervals and analogies of a single
body. Moreover this single body itself will not be taken whole
but cropped (literally, anatomized) so as to declare its
symmetrical relations intramurally, as it were, without
reference to classical canons of wholeness, of completed form -
rather, with regard to new proportions, new affinities, among
them figures which include the genitals in unabashed exploration
of what has always been treated as the body's disgraced
member.
Notes courtesy of Richard Howard in his essay "The Mapplethorpe Effect" in the book Robert Mapplethorpe by Richard Marshall, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 1988.