Mapplethorpe’s familiar milky-marbly creatures, here a group of the celebrated of the mid-to-late 80s; and we see how many of them we have forgotten. (The one face that pops out with a contemporary snap is Susan Sarandon’s.) There is an accompanying foreword by Joan Didion that is marvelously harsh and authoritative in her style; clearly the ooh-aah factor of Mapplethorpe’s work was contemptible to her. She’s not a huge fan of his subjects either, save for the “sensible” Yoko Ono. A quite remarkable little essay.

Didion, in her introduction, points out Mapplethorpe's Catholic upbringing which, he says, influences the symmetry of his compositions. The lighting is wonderful and only calls attention to itself when one realizes that there are few shadows in the portraits

Just spent some time with this in the wake of finishing Just Kids. Nice Joan Didion intro. Gorgeous and fascinating photos, especially the ones of Patti. Also stared at the Cyndi Lauper one for a long time.

This is just a miniature book of photos Mapplethorpe took of famous women back in the 1980s. The photos aren't even interesting. Nothing to see here, folks, move on.

Three and a half stars

I borrowed Robert Mapplethorpe’s Some Women from the local library when I was reading Patti Smith’s Just Kids. The library copy was missing pages 11-20 (cut out, perhaps, by a misguided fan of Lisa Marie). Readers of this review should keep this condition in mind, along with my non-expertise in the aesthetics of photography.

Some Women includes “An Annotation by Joan Didion” (pages 5-7). Didion acknowledges Mapplethorpe’s reputation as a transgressive artist but feels these photographs, mostly from the later 1980s, reveal a Romantic inclination, and she perceives a 19th century aesthetic controlling many of them.

Didion specifies Mapplethorpe’s photographs of female children (pages 51-59) as having a particular 19th century sensibility. Some readers, however, may find the first and last of this subseries, showing the girls naked, to be the most “transgressive” photographs in the book. Yet both of the girls are holding their hands over their genitals, looking like poor little tots who need to pee. Not enticing at all.

The book has few complete nudes, and only two glimpses of pubic hair. Among the nudes, Dovanna looks striking in late pregnancy (page 64) and Sonia Resika and Tracy Lambert hold a pose of hands on knees, shoulder, and shin (page 23). There are three photographs of nude men with clothed women, one of Thomas and Dovanna (page 89) and two of Melody and Paul Wadina (pages 92-93).

Women bare breasts in several photographs. Sonia Braga is shown with hair flying to the left, eyes and mouth wide with surprise, as if her top had been blown off (p.96). In a waist-up photograph, Lara Harris has pulled down her tee-shirt to expose a single breast, as if it were the latest fashion (page 29). There are semi-nudes, a particularly attractive one of Susan Sarandon holding a towel over her front (page 63).

Many photographs show head and shoulders or just head. One such is of Grace Jones (page 69), which calls to Didion’s mind “the nineteenth century passion for the exotic, the romance with Africa, with Egypt” (page 7). I see a gentler Grace Jones than her image elsewhere projects. Other memorable photographs of this type include those of Laurie Anderson, a familiar spiky-haired image (page 78), Sandra Bernhard, looking both tough and tender (page 67), and Patti Smith, the cover photograph of Dream of Life (page 111).

There are several impressive photographs of older women. A mink coat armors Eleanor Lambert Berkson (page 44). Dolphina Neil-Jones appears dressed up for church (page (109). Louise Nevelson looks more like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard than Swanson herself (page 49). While Mapplethorpe took a chance with naked children, his older women in this collectioj are fully clothed. The closest they come to undress is Alice Neel in a black slip (page 47).

Robert Mapplethorpe has had a major impact on the photographic view of human beauty and its statuesque, highly
esthetic nature of it. When you see his photographs, it's rather the elegant, nostalgic and melancholic feel of the photos that make an impression, being less the part of objectification of the bodies or sexual take on it that could get your attention, like in the majority of todays magazines and fashion photography.

His portraits are somehow radiant, with not many facial features to be seen. That's probably because the american photographer wanted these creations to appear more like paintings, even - symmetrical as he liked to say - with not so many lights and shadows, rather than to give them that kinda ordinary, conventional look of people being photographed.

Joan Didion's annotation was a plus for this book, especially when it was said that the more you talk with others about your artistic process(Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mapplethorpe and others agreed on this), your creativity and inspiration, the smaller will the mistery around that particular passion get, the weaker the outcome of it all can be. Therefore, even if you don't realize it by talking about it, your personal satisfaction itself could diminish...

Again, having just finished Patti Smith’s Memoir of her life with Mapplethorpe, I looked at this book to see his work in black and white portraiture, his career in full swing. Just Kids focuses on their early life together, but it’s clear early on he (and she) liked to take portraits—of Warhol, of his friend Wagstaff, of Patti Smith, many many others. His idea was not to mirror the time, but shape perceptions of the time, to create the time.

There’s 16 of the portraits on this site, so you can see the range of what is a kind of reflection of female beauty.

http://weinstein-gallery.com/exhibits...

On the surface, perused quickly, it might appear that this collection is a fairly typical bevy of beauties, celebrities--Isabella Rossellini, Grace Jones, Sigourney Weaver, Yoko Ono, Brooke Shields, Cyndi Lauper, Susan Sarandon, taken by a celebrity photographer. But this is more than a splash of People or Vogue magazine puff pieces. They reveal relationships, romance, a romance with women, and even as Joan Didion writes in her introduction to the volume, “a romance with art.” They’re often exquisite, powerful, the work of a master. Some of the best of them are of people I don't know, not famous people.

But my main interest, having just read Smith’s book, are—again, for me, for so many viewers—are Mapplethorpe's loving portraits of his primary lifelong subject, Patti Smith.

Portraits of women (obviously) and girls including Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, Susan Sarandon, Eva Amurri, Sigourney Weaver, Grace Jones, Brooke Shields, Cyndi Lauper and many others.

Awesome....

Stunning portraits.

picked this up because i saw joan didion wrote the introduction to it so naturally, i was curious. of course she praised mapplethorpe and in some capacity called it genius (very loosely paraphrasing). i do remember her saying it was very victorian and catholic of him since he loved to emphasize the influence of catholicism in the composition of his photos. didn't find them particularly victorian, just deeply contrasted and illuminated with little to no shadows. i just can't consume mapplethorpe photos without thinking about how he was a fetishist of Black people, and Black gay men in particular and just a gross person. i don't really like the way he takes photos of women. most of them feature women nude in an objectifying way as some of them are bodies severed from their heads by framing. i don't really feel personality from his photos, just more like advertisements sometimes.