Cosa si nasconde dietro a una foto di grande impatto? Molto, perfino l’inimmaginabile direbbe l’occhio profano. In un articolo ben circostanziato comparso su Esquire a maggio dello scorso anno, sette mesi dopo la morte di Robert Mapplethorpe, Joan Didion restituisce l’operato del grande fotografo. Alcuni stralci:
“Of the women Robert Mapplethorpe chose to photograph during the course of his career, most were well known, figures of considerable celebrity or fashion or achievement. There were models and there were actresses. There were singers, dancers, choreographers; makers of art and dealers in art. Most were New York women, with the familiar New York edge. Most were conventionally “pretty,” even “beautiful,” or rendered so not only by the artifices of light and makeup but by the way they presented themselves to the camera: They were professional women, performers before the camera. They were women who knew how to make their way in the world. They were women who knew a lot of things, and what they knew did not, on the evidence, encourage certainty. Some met the camera with closed eyes, as in a carnal swoon, or Victorian faint. Others confronted it so directly as to seem startled into a fleeting madness“.
Lisa Lyon
“The idealization here was never of the present. Mapplethorpe photographs meant to sell bathing suits suggested not the athleticism associated with an idealized present, not freedom of movement at all, but bondage, and spanking, the sexual dreams of imperial England“.
“Songbirds always eat: this is not a “modern” idea, nor did the women in Mapplethorpe photographs present themselves to us as modern women. There were in some of his photographs the familiar nineteenth-century images of domination and submission, the erotic discomforts of straps and leather and five-inch heels, of those shoes that cause the wearer’s flesh to wrinkle at the instep“.
Grace Jones
“The familiar face of Grace Jones, as photographed by Mapplethorpe, suggested not the androgynous future for which it had come to stand but the nineteenth-century passion for the exotic, the romance with Africa, with Egypt“.
Thomas and Dovanna
“A Mapplethorpe fashion photograph, the naked black “Thomas” dancing with the spectrally white “Dovanna,” suggested classical ballet, the pas de deux in which the betrayer courts the betrayed, back from the grave, the prima ballerina from the dance of the shades“.
Rosie and Honey
“Even little girls, as photographed by Mapplethorpe, seemed Victorian, not children in the modern sense but sentient beings, creatures with barrettes and bunnies but nonetheless grave with responsibility; small adults, who gazed at us with the utter clarity of what they knew and did not yet know“.
Yoko Ono
“Perversely, of all the women Robert Mapplethorpe photographed, perhaps only Yoko Ono presented herself as “modern,” entirely in charge of herself, a woman who had negotiated the demands of sex and celebrity to appear before us as a middle-aged survivor, with sensible lapels, clear eyes, blown hair“.
Robert Mapplethorpe: “Cerco l’inatteso. Cerco cose che non ho mai visto prima. Ma faccio fatica con la parola ‘scioccante’ perché devo dire che non mi sciocca nulla – ero nella posizione giusta per scattare quelle foto. Sentivo l’obbligo di farlo“.
Da questa dichiarazione si evince che la provocazione, certe narrazioni sfrontate e la stessa rappresentazione spinta del sesso non sono frutto di una mente incline a turbare di proposito l’osservatore. Mapplethorpe ha un’urgenza, che sia artistica o meno poco importa, e la esprime nell’unica maniera che conosce: disprezzando il sistema per non venir meno alla propria natura.