Robert mapplethorpe book biography on wernherb

Robert Mapplethorpe was an anomaly. A sometimes mediocre photographer with a keen eye for disrupting scenes through being a punk, sometimes shaking things up in ways that nobody else had done before him.

He seems also to have been a parasite, a racist, a nice guy, brutal and a relentless self-serving publicity-machine.

So, what draws people to Mapplethorpe?

Is it because of his images of people, especially the sexually toned ones?

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His near-marriage with Patti Smith while living with her for seven years? Anything else? Probably the sex-related pictures, and the American trials for obscenity charges that followed after Mapplethorpe's death due to AIDS in 1989.

Mapplethorpe was a shining example of "niceness" until he left the military academy where his parents had sent him to become "a man".

"Robert was a little too intense and conservative for me.

He was almost the stereotypic 'good boy.' "
-Nancy Nemeth, ROTC Military Ball Queen, 1964

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