Edward Mapplethorpe’s tax return lists his profession as “photographer/artist,” but the scene in his Manhattan studio suggests that “baby wrangler” is more accurate.
He coos, whistles, clucks, hoots, beep-beeps, uh-ohs and peekaboos with his small subject, who is strapped into a jerry-built contraption fashioned from a plastic chair found on eBay and an automotive seatbelt, secured to a tabletop.
For the last 20 years, Mr. Mapplethorpe has photographed babies on their first birthday (the idea originated when he offered the experience in a charity auction), and 60 of these black-and-white portraits make up his new book, “One: Sons & Daughters.”
He is the un-Anne Geddes; the babies are not transformed into butterflies and mermaids, not plopped into flowerpots or wrapped with cabbage leaves. These are not fantasy images — not bowdlerized, not even especially flattering — and they do not aim for the smiling “Say cheese” millisecond beloved by family photographers.
They are unabashedly honest and familiar to any parent: often pouty, tearful, perplexed, fierce, wary. Adam Gopnick, the writer for The New Yorker whose essay accompanies the book, imagines the babies thinking: “Who’s this guy? What’s his machine? Isn’t this weird? Where’s Mom?” One little boy faces the camera with such intensity and defiantly crossed arms, he might be channeling Donald Trump.
In many ways, Edward is also the un-Robert Mapplethorpe, the famous older brother who is the subject of a recent HBO documentary and current retrospective at the Getty Center and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. That notorious oeuvre included children with their genitals exposed. (Two such photos exhibited at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati 25 years ago were part of a trial believed to be the first in which a museum was charged with obscenity.)
The subjects of “One” are bare but asexual, showing only their myriad expressions and chubby torsos. “You don’t even know if it’s a boy or a girl,” Mr. Mapplethorpe said. “I think it adds a bit of mystery. There are no stereotypes bestowed on that child. It’s always about the eyes to me, but I know the limitations of depth of field, how close I can get. There’s no negotiating with a 1-year-old.”
Why 1? Andrew Solomon, a professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University Medical Center, posits an answer in his essay for the book. Newborns are basically interchangeable and without nuance — we attribute unique characteristics to them rather irrationally because we love them — but at that first birthday, we can start to tell who the child will be.
He or she can convey humor, charm, surprise, anxiety, dismay. Their faces express what they don’t have words for yet. Age 1 is “the final moment of expressive innocence,” Professor Solomon writes.
In another of the book’s essays, the writer Francine Prose attributes a magical state of being to 1-year-olds, drifting between the infant world of pure consciousness and the world of older children or adults, of experience and language.
That world is a sacred space to Mr. Mapplethorpe. “One is a beautiful word, concept, age,” he said. “It’s that cusp before they’re tainted, before any outside influence gets into their psyche.”
Parents are kept out of earshot and eyesight during the photo shoot, with no idea what will ensue.
“My wife and I love pictures of our children looking rosy-cheeked and gorgeous, but what these photos show is character and a bit of gumption,” said Tim Jeffries, who owns Hamiltons Gallery in London and who commissioned portraits of Coco and Rex. “And let’s not forget that Edward was profoundly aware of his brother’s practice. These photos are Mapplethorpes, works of art, with all the integrity of that image-making, the quality of light and of composition.”
The photographer, a wiry 55 with a tiny chin piercing, was himself the “baby” of six siblings growing up in Floral Park, Queens, and had only a glancing early relationship with the increasingly infamous brother who considered the family and community to be provincial and déclassé.
But after studying photography at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, he went to work in Robert’s Bond Street studio, which benefited from his formal training. “Robert had no interest in the technical side of photography,” said Patricia Morrisroe, who wrote his biography. “He never did his own printing, and his work grew in sophistication and proficiency when he brought his brother on.”
Edward could have chosen a profession that wouldn’t engender comparisons, but he believed, in a lapsed Catholic sort of way, that he was destined to get to know his brother through a shared vocation.
“At the end of the day he’d say, ‘What are you doing? Why don’t you stick around?’” Edward said. “We’d smoke a joint and look at the fruits of the last few days’ work. It was all about him, not ‘Let me see what you’ve been doing.’ I was taking pictures and doing my printing on the off hours, not even telling him about it. But those are some of my fondest memories. He used to giggle like a little kid with me.”
Their professional alliance essentially ended when both were invited to exhibit at the same show, and Robert insisted that Edward change his surname to Maxey (their mother’s maiden name).
“He did not want any competition or any confusion,” Ms. Morrisroe said. “My sense was that Robert was aware he didn’t have much time on earth and didn’t want another photographer named Mapplethorpe. Edward was family but was not made to feel that way. He was treated like the help, but he liked the work and admired his brother very much.”
After Robert was told he had AIDS, Edward became one of his caretakers until his death in 1989, but the brotherly approbation he yearned for never came. And Edward had quite a few anxious H.I.V. tests himself.
“I numbed myself in those years, thinking I was fooling everybody,” he said. “Marijuana had seeped into our Queens neighborhood pretty early — that was nothing new — and then cocaine and heroin, which really kicked my ass. You think you have control, and maybe you do on Thursday, but then on Friday, you lose it. It’s the devil.
“I went to my medical doctor in tears and said: ‘I’m in trouble. Robert’s going to die and will possibly leave me some money, and if I’m in this state, I know where it will go. I’ll end up dead or in jail.’” With counseling, he said, he has remained drug-free for two decades.
Inheriting his brother’s cameras, Mr. Mapplethorpe developed his own successful style. His early work is considered a bridge between photography and abstract painting; one series of photos was taken under water or through sheets of ice; another used human and animal hair as the medium. But his personal life was chaotic.
“Two of my brothers died young, and I wondered how much time I had left,” he said. “I told women I wasn’t going to get serious. I was brazen and unapologetic. That’s how I lived my life for the next decade.”
Even after he fell in love with Michelle Yun, now a curator at the Asia Society, he remained a reluctant groom. “Typical me, I’d say, ‘Well, if you ever got pregnant, I’d marry you right away.’ It was not going to work that way. So I called Patti.”
That would be Patti Smith, the singer-performer-hyphenate whose relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe was the subject of her memoir “Just Kids.” In Edward she had recognized a fellow sensitive spirit. When he was 8, she gave him a book about artists, inscribing it, “Eddie, hope you’ll be one too some day.”
He asked her to become ordained as a Universal Life minister to officiate at his 2012 wedding, and she wrote a poem as the introduction to his book.
“One” is dedicated to Mr. Mapplethorpe’s 1-year-old son, Harrison, whose portrait is included in it, although unidentified, as are all the babies. “There are some children of very wealthy people, sons and daughters of celebrities,” he said. “I didn’t want, ‘That’s so-and-so’s baby.’ It doesn’t matter that one is from privilege and another from a more modest background.”
Well, not so modest: The cost is $15,000 for two large gelatin silver prints. “One, I always say, is safe, meaning I’m quite confident that the parent is going to like it,” Mr. Mapplethorpe said. “The other is a little more challenging. That’s the one that when the parents call me years later, they often say: ‘You were absolutely right. There’s something you got about him or her that’s now apparent.’
Written By AIMEE LEE BALL
Source: New York Times
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