Customer Reviews

Mapplethorpe: Assault With a Deadly Camera

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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.

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."

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.

This memoir has haunted me since I first read it. I'm no longer shocked, just haunted by the humanness of Mapplethorpe. A well written reminiscence about life in the fast lane and art that draws my emotions and intellect like recent movies on Jackson Pollock and Basquiat as well as Arenas in "Before Night Falls", and a bit like the film "Total Eclipse" about Rimbaud and Verlaine with Leonardo di Caprio. The Catholicism of both Mapplethorpe and the author Fritscher plays a fascinating role in the photographer's photo imagery and the author's desire to confess the inside curve of the fast lane of their life together. Photographer George Dureau is one of the strongest characters in the book along with the mystical photographer, Joel-Peter Witkin. Wild.

Few artists have been mythologized as quickly and as completely as the late Robert Mapplethorpe. The incredible life of the controversial photographer is given new focus in the biography Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera by friend, confidant, and former lover Jack Fritscher. Insider knowledge of the man humanizes a complex individual who has become obscured by his art and by the scourge of censorship.
This revealing portrait by Hastings House publishers shows Mapplethorpe from his early days as a fledgling photographer. As the former editor of Drummer magazine, it was Fritscher who gave Mapplethorpe his first magazine cover. The biography traces his rise to prominence as the avant-garde photographer of the New York art scene, his sexual obsessions, his ongoing relationship with punk legend Patti Smith, his drug use, his submersion into leather culture, his love of beauty, his theories on art, and much more. Into the narrative Fritscher weaves a fair amount of artistic exploration and examination as well.
Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera also contains a generous number of photos and a gold mine of data about not only Robert Mapplethorpe, but about the larger scope of the gay leathersex New York scene of the late 70s and early 80s. Fritscher explores somewhat extensively the great creators of the erotic image from that period such as Rex, as well as those on the photographic cutting edge such as Joel-Peter Witkin. By exploring Mapplethorpe's influences as well as his life, Fritscher provides the reader with a wider understanding not only of the artist, but also of his world and times.

I don't know the man any better after reading this book than I did before. But I do have some compassion now for the lifestyle choices he and others made, and the logic behind those choices. He seemed driven to the self-destruction which he achieved.

The book was well written and personal to an uncomfortable extreme. I don't think it was a waste of time, but as a non-gay, non-avant garde person, I am happy to say that I don't feel included in the audience of this book.

I started the book and after the first paragraph, I almost decided to pass on reading. Author, Jack Fritscher credits himself with "I helped him create himself" - they met in 1977. That grandiose attitude really turned me off. Although, I did read the book and found it informative and interesting. It is somewhat scattered, but it is honest and enlightening.

By chasing down lots of interviews, author Fritscher manages to have several friends of Mapplethorpe compose their thoughts of robert and his photographs. The beauty of this book is the multiple voices speaking which Fritscher takes the time to present to honor Mapplethorpe. He could have had the last word himself--after all, he had the book contract and was the man's sometime lover. This Mapplethorpe memoir is actually written by the following artists and personalities who Fritscher presents--AND LETS SPEAK IN THEIR OWN VOICES WHICH HE COLLECTED: GEORGE DUREAU, HOLLY SOLOMON, CAMILLE O'GRADY, REX, MARK WALKER, THE INCREDIBLE MILES EVERETT, EDWARD LUCIE-SMITH, JOEL-PETER WITKIN. (Yes, this book is scary, and it gets scarier as time goes by and our culture becomes more puritanical. It's also a good reference book of those times and events that are now so far back in the past.

Written as a tell-all memoir of pop culture, this book is amazing in what it tells us about lost lives in lost times. Real nostalgia. Actually, this book is loaded with "gay street credential." The fact that it has an index tells you the book seriously intends to record history's major and minor characters. Many gay pop culture books don't even bother to have an index which makes them useless. My litmus test in a book store is to first see if a book has an index, and then I skim it to see who's included and who's not, because that way I can judge the book's presentation and prejudices. Too bad Patty Smith doesn't write about Mapplethorpe and this period like his boyfriend did in writing this attack on American lying, political hypocrisy, and phoney art wackjobs. What is generously amazing is that boyfriend Fritscher seems to genuinely miss and mourne Mapplethorpe to the degree that he devotes 60% of the book to direct interviews with other Mapplethorpe art friends like George Dureau, Joel-Peter Witkin, and others who all speak for themselves.

I found this book extremely disappointing and agree with other reviewers that the author seemed more interested in aggrandizing himself through association with Mapplethorpe. Fritscher also seems intent on producing this biography to prove that Mapplethorpe selected him, rather than Patricia Morrisroe, as biographer. The writing is annoying, frequently repetitive, and skips all over the place chronologically. The book comes across more as a collection of magazine/newspapers articles rather than a coherent whole.