Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–1989) was an American photographer renowned for his black-and-white portraits and nudes, as well as for documenting New York’s sadomasochistic scene. His work is marked by a rigorous formal approach, placing light, shadow, and form at the core of a practice inspired by classical ideals of beauty.
Contested in the late 1980s by the American religious right, his work became central to a national debate on artistic freedom and public funding for the arts. Close to Patti Smith and influenced by Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp, Mapplethorpe experimented with collage and various photographic techniques from the 1970s onward. In 1988, the Whitney Museum of American Art presented the first major retrospective of his work, one year before his death.