August 17th, 2011 / 1:56 pm
Craft Notes

Robert Mapplethorpe on Writing

“I don’t know why my pictures come out looking so good. I just don’t get it.”

“I just want to be written about as a normal artist.”

“I recorded that because it happened to me. I wasn’t making a point.”

“I don’t think any collector knows his true motivation.”

“I played around with the flowers and the lighting, so that was a good way to educate myself.”

“I wish I could be elegant.”

“I’m not a photojournalist.”

“If I am at a party, I want to be at the party. Too many photographers use the camera to avoid participating in things. They become professional observers.”

“My lifestyle is bizarre, but the only thing you need to know is where the darkroom is.”

“One must ease the public into it – that’s an art in itself.”

“The more pictures you see, the better you are as a photographer.”

“The photographs that are art have to be separated from the rest – then preserved.”

“To make pictures big is to make them more powerful.”

“Whenever you make love to someone, there should be three people involved – you, the other person, and the devil.”

“With photography, you zero in; you put a lot of energy into short moments, and then you go on to the next thing.”

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10 Comments

  1. Wolf Larsen

      “Whenever you make love to someone, there should be three people involved – you, the other person, and the devil.”

      I couldn’t agree more! And I doubt I could say it so good!

  2. Ken Baumann

      YES: “If I am at a party, I want to be at the party. Too many photographers use the camera to avoid participating in things. They become professional observers.”

  3. Laura Carter

      “I recorded that because it happened to me. I wasn’t making a point.” Very true.

  4. deadgod

      It would be interesting if a photographer could take pictures that detached their viewers from their content – pictures that shortwired empathy. 

      I don’t think it matters – to the possible quality of the pictures – if the photographer acts like a participant or an observer:  there the photographer is.

  5. deadgod

      I also don’t think it’s possible that ‘recording a document’ can make no “point”.

      He seems to want to make pictures that are “more powerful”:  what is Mapplethorpe trying to evade? his own authority?

  6. Laura Carter

      Point de capiton…. Maybe. The aesthetics of recording would imply there’s not a “point,” that art is not reified….

      However, readers (reader-response always varies) are free to impute intentionality and rhetoric to an author (this also applies to viewers). At least this is what I think right now.

  7. Tomes and Talismans
  8. deadgod

      Inferring a particular intention on the part of a particular author is secondary here; the fact of a document is the fact of – in Mapplethorpe’s words – the cause in “because it happened”.  Somebody/ies chose “to record”–that is a “point”, making possible the visibility, as it were, of intention, political-economic meaning, cultural position, aesthetic determination, and so on in and through the document (which will probably have many such “points”). 

      I don’t know what you mean by “aesthetics of recording”; how does ‘indication or disclosure through form’ pertain categorically to “recording”?  (To me, what matters, at least initially, is that someone/s made a document in some form.)  I also don’t know what you mean by “art” not being “reified”.  A document is a ‘thing’, no?

  9. Laura Carter

      Reification is an instant, yes, but not necessarily pointed. 

  10. Krystal

      “I’d rather dig ditches than sleep with these people.”