Self-Portrait

Robert Mapplethorpe began his arts education at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, following which painting and sculpture became his main focus. However, after meeting John McKendry in the early 1970s, who was a curator of photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he adopted photography almost exclusively, a discipline through which he would be linked to the collective imagination.
While in retrospect, it is his sexually explicit images that have become most characteristic of his iconography, Mapplethorpe’s early work in photography centred on self-portraits, such as those shown here, and portraits of his closest social circle. Although removed from the idea of self-portraiture as a stable affirmation of identity, these images propose a mobile, constructed and performative one. In one of the photos, the artist appears in profile, dressed as a woman. In the other, he takes on the defiant air of a hyperbolic male archetype: a 1950s greaser, evoking cultural codes associated with virility and rebellion. The confrontation between both images highlights the tension between conventional signs of masculinity and femininity — physical, aesthetic and sartorial — revealing their learned and normative nature. By embodying these extremes, Mapplethorpe does not seek a conciliatory synthesis, but rather aims to reveal the fragility of the binary categories that structure gender identity.

Raúl Martínez Arranz / Francisco Rojas