Robert Mapplethorpe: Photographies, published by 5 Continents Editions in 2016, is a French-language exhibition catalogue shaped by the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Edited by Paul Martineau and Britt Salvesen, it presents Mapplethorpe’s photography across a broad register: elegant floral still lifes, portraits, and the controversial erotic images associated with New York’s gay s/m community. The range is not incidental. It places formally controlled studies of beauty beside photographs that tested the limits of public acceptability and representation.
The book’s principal value lies in the way it joins visual breadth to sustained examination. Its selection draws on institutional holdings of editioned works, mixed-media objects, and Polaroid instant prints, together with resources from the Robert Mapplethorpe Archive at the Getty Research Institute. Five essays address sexuality and identity, while a chronology, exhibition history, bibliography, and index extend the catalogue beyond a sequence of reproductions. The result is an account of a practice in which classical grace, technical discipline, ambition, and controversy remain inseparable.
For serious collectors, this volume deserves attention as a substantial documentary and interpretive record of Mapplethorpe’s career and continuing afterlife. It does not reduce the artist to either his polished surfaces or the disputes surrounding his work; instead, it gives those tensions a structured context. The 340-page hardcover, issued with a jacket and 241 colour illustrations, is designed as a considered point of access to an oeuvre whose influence and relevance continue to be reassessed. Its combination of museum-derived material, editorial scholarship, and a wide photographic selection makes it useful both for close study of individual images and for understanding the larger arc of Mapplethorpe’s practice.
