Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera: A Pop Culture Memoir-An Outlaw Reminiscence (Hardcover)

~ (Author), John Fritscher (Author)

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: LPC Group (August 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1890834297
• ISBN-13: 978-1890834296
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #3,794,604 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 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.

7 of 7 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.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I knew Bob Mapplethorpe, May 5, 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."