Robert Mapplethorpe United States, 1946-1989

Robert Mapplethorpe was born in 1946 in Floral Park, Queens, New York. In 1963, he enrolled at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he studied drawing, painting, and sculpture. Influenced by artists such as Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp, he also experimented with various materials and mixed-media collages. He acquired a Polaroid camera in 1970 from artist and filmmaker Sandy Daley and began producing his own photographs to incorporate into his collages, saying "it was more honest."

In the late 1970s, Mapplethorpe grew increasingly interested in documenting the New York S&M scene. The resulting photographs were both shocking for their content and remarkable for their technical and formal mastery.