Instant Gratification
Ariella Budick, Financial Times
May 2008
The name Robert Mapplethorpe conjures up cool, slick, faultless photographs of the human body, rendered in marmoreal black and white. It also connotes the explicit but exquisitely composed X-rated pictures that excited intense political scrutiny in the early 1990s. What the name does not usually suggest is tenderness, imperfection, or spontaneity – which is why the Whitney’s small but packed little show of the photographer’s early Polaroids comes as such a welcome shock. […]