Throughout the 1980s, Mapplethorpe, a white photographer who identified as gay, frequently collaborated with Black models such as the bodybuilder Ken Moody. “I’m trying to make sculpture without having to sculpt . . . I’m looking for perfection in form,” Mapplethorpe stated in 1983. In a coauthored essay written in 1988, Isaac Julien and Black British theorist Kobena Mercer described their “ambivalence” toward the photographs: “We want to look but don’t always find the images we want to see.” In the film Looking for Langston, Julien places Mapplethorpe’s photographs within a history of artists who depicted ideas about Black masculinity through an outsider’s gaze.
Gallery label from 2024