Mapplethorpe’s Secret Diary
Sylvia Wolfe, The Guardian
October 2007
Robert Mapplethorpe’s sexually explicit, homoerotic photographs made him one of the most notorious photographers of the 1980s and a lightning rod for social and political conservatives. But before these works - and before his equally famous nudes, flower studies and celebrity portraits made between the late 1970s and his death from Aids in 1989 - Mapplethorpe was taking hundreds of Polaroids. This remarkable treasure trove of more than 1,500 photographs, the majority of them never published, reveal how instant photography provided Mapplethorpe with a mode of entry into his creative ambition, his sexual desires and the art world at large. […]