Robert Mapplethorpe

Robert Mapplethorpe was born in 1946 in the New York City borough of Queens. At the age of sixteen, he left home to study art at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, where he concentrated on painting, drawing, and sculpture.
After graduating in 1970, he experimented with the idea of the photograph as an object and began to take his own pictures.
The turning point in his artistic development occured when, at the age of twenty-five, he met Sam Wagstaff, a former museum curator, who provided him with financial support and encouraged him to concentrate on photography.
His first solo exhibition opened in New York in 1976, and the first major museum retrospective of his work was presented by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1988. One year later, he died of AIDS.

Robert Mapplethorpe Images:
Derrick Cross
Thomas