Robert Mapplethorpe. ‘Retrospektive’ Exhibition. C/O Gallery, Berlin.

This exhibition featured the works of artist Robert Mapplethorpe, an influential photographer who produced a body of works featuring portraits, male and female nudes, delicate flower still life’s, and Polaroid’s.
His graphic coverage of the S&M underground porn industry was the most shocking part of the exhibition, however the aesthetic qualities of the images deterred away from the radical subject matter, with focus on light and composition, they were able to convey a certain beauty about them.
Mapplethorpe’s use of light and composition in his black and white portraits and nudes sparked a real interest in the way photography can capture personality within its subjects. The detail of the body as a landscape seemed to be a real influence in Mapplethorpe’s photography as well as, I think, what characteristics of a person are attractive to him.

Rigorously flawless, radically focused—the still-lifes and portraits of Robert Mapplethorpe are quiet, formally consummate compositions set in an atmosphere of clinical purity. Movements are harmonized down to the last detail; flawless bodies turn into landscapes; and explicitly sexual acts and nakedness become cool, almost de-eroticized studies of the body, in which technical perfection takes the foreground. This extreme aestheticism strips the content of its severity. It isolates the essentials and opens them up to view. It is precisely this concentration and objectivity that imbues his photographs with a freshness and relevance to this day.

(www.co-berlin.info)