Mapplethorpe: Assault With a Deadly Camera [Hardcover]

Jack Fritscher (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 25, 1994

A memoir of the famous photographer by a former friend.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Fritscher's brutally frank memoir of his ex-lover, confidant, and colleague, drawn from the author's personal documents, seeks to strip away the notoriety surrounding the defiant photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. As editor and writer for the gay magazine Drummer, Fritscher was the first to publish Mapplethorpe's highly charged camera shots depicting a seamy world of "leathersex," sadomasochism, taboos, and fetishes. Here, Fritscher graphically portrays the masculine subculture of the homosexual community that Mapplethorpe inhabited until his death from AIDS in 1989, at age 42. He also discusses the censorship of Mapplethorpe's work within the mainstream gay community. Interestingly, Mapplethorpe's bitterly controversial photographs, taken during the turbulent 1970s and 1980s-during the period of Watergate, Vietnam, Patti Hearst, sexual liberation, and political deceptions-have become more a documentary of our times. Recommended for popular culture collections.
Joan Levin, MLS, Chicago
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

The then-undiscovered camera artist Mapplethorpe asked Drummer Magazine editor Fritscher to examine his portfolio, resulting in an assignment and subsequent fame. The two later became colleagues and lovers: this biography of Mapplethorpe provides a personal first-person account of his life based on a review of journals and a personal knowledge going beyond the interview stage. -- Midwest Book Review

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 306 pages
• Publisher: Hastings House; 1st edition (September 25, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0803893620
• ISBN-13: 978-0803893627
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,499,065 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jack Fritscher emerging from the gay past exists, both now and in the future, as a pioneer participant in gay culture and as a critic chronicling analytical witness to that history. He is the double-jointed author of literary fiction as well as of erotic fiction, including 4 novels, 5 fiction anthologies, 3 nonfiction books, and 2 produced plays. He is also the director and videographer of 170 feature videos. A Gemini, born June 20, 1939, he has balanced twin careers in literature and erotica--often recombinantly.

MID-CENTURY GAY WRITERS
A gay pioneer from the 1960s, he wrote the 1968 novel, "I Am Curious (Leather)," began before Stonewall his research on "Popular Witchcraft," befriended the legendary and elderly gay author Sam Steward (Phil Andros) in 1969, and became the founding San Francisco editor shaping the legendary "Drummer" magazine (1975) which published his features, fiction, and photographs for 25 years in more than 62 issues. Those writings and photographs, annotated with historical commentary by the author, are available free online at this site.

In 1953 at age 14, he came out into the closeted gay world by writing a "gladiator novel" while attending the Vatican's ultra-exclusive Catholic seminary, the Pontifical College Josephinum, where the bullies were not the jocks but the opera-and-liturgy queens. His short fiction was first published in 1958 in the Catholic press.

Also adolescents at this time, his American gay peers were John Rechy; William Carney; Rita Mae Brown; and Dorothy Allison; as well as Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, and Edmund White who founded their Violet Quill in late 1980.

These mid-century careers made possible the next generation: the fin de siecle writers who appeared after HIV in 1982. They rose during the late-80s invention of history's first viable small lesbigay book publishers whose anthologies took the place of the once-flourishing gay magazines which by the millennium had collapsed because of internet competition.

DIVERSITY, PERVERSITY. THEOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY
As a diverse wild card among his 20th-century contemporaries, Fritscher is the only Catholic writer, and the only actual holder of an earned PhD in literature. In addition, he is the only writer who also composes and creates as a photographer and videographer. In 1966, he wrote the world's first PhD dissertation on Tennessee Williams titled "Love and Death in Tennessee Williams: His Philosophy and Theology." Themes and rituals of Catholicism thread through his fiction and nonfiction from the incarnational "Some Dance to Remember" to the passion and death of "Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera." His formal training in philosophy, theology, literature, and criticism is the architecture of his sweeping historical work on witchcraft, the drama of Tennessee Williams, the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe, and the popular culture of homosexuality. His photography is a succession of heroic and suffering images from the "Roman Martyrology of the Saints."

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Shockingly personal confession of two artists and an era, April 17, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Mapplethorpe: Assault With a Deadly Camera (Hardcover)

There is much reason to be shocked by the author's candor on the pages of this memoir, and that candor is index of how very true is the truth in this highly personal, highly polemical book. Mapplethorpe's impenetrable character opens up in the author's quite original thesis that Mapplethorpe was shocking more in his images of death than in his images of sex. Death in cut flowers. Death in imagery of guns, knives, etc. all the way to Mapplethorpe's own dying face. Book's thesis, despising art-world politics as much as the politically-correct gay world, connects Mapplethorpe's image manipulation to psychologically scarring and self-reflective Catholicism shared by both the photographer and the writer. Author writes scenes so formally detailed they read like film sequences. The marketing and lies of American culture are the real pornography exposed in this memoir. Even writing about Mapplethorpe, as Pultizer Prize winner Michael Cunningham found in Elle magazine, brings upon the writer and the book some of the opprobrium Mapplethorpe haters cannot level at the dead photographer, who is to this day hated as much by the fundamentalist right as the Marxist left, to say nothing of legions of gay photographers who unlike Mapplethorpe could not escape gay genre photography. This book's psyche is so raw the author must have suffered an agony in confessing his own emotional connection to a friend he repeatedly states he wishes to remember as a person and not a gifted technician or controversial symbol. Certainly, the author, as journalist, succeeded in eliciting poignant feelings, comments, memories, and grief from the blind boy in New Orleans, from painter George Dureau, from photographer Joel Peter Witkin. Book is personal, intense, and raw. The passing of time makes its historical "take" of the 1970's quite interesting.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I knew Bob Mapplethorpe, May 4, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Mapplethorpe: Assault With a Deadly Camera (Hardcover)

I knew Bob Mapplethorpe, and I remember the 70's scene, and if Bob had lived to see all this book of which he'd read a part, he'd have reviewed it with his immortal line, "If you don't like this book, you ain't as avant garde as you think."

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Personal insight on Mapplethorpe's life, November 8, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Mapplethorpe: Assault With a Deadly Camera (Hardcover)

Jack Fritscher writes this memoir on Mapplethorpe's life, Fritscher's own gay coming out and the crossing of paths with Mapplethorpe in a shortlived bi coastal love affair. There is an intersting description of life in New York in the 70s, 80s and 90s in the art scene, gay scene, AIDS, the controversial Mapplethorpian art and attacks to it. The life of a genius of our times is reviewed in a dynamic, personal tell of much in the style of Fritscher. It is an intersting insight on the artist, the man and the art scene of such time, both in photography, painting and literature.