Robert Mapplethorpe

Robert Mapplethorpe’s work of the early 1970s reveals an artist still constructing the visual and conceptual vocabulary that would later define his mature photographs. Before the severe formalism of his portraits, flowers, and figure studies, Mapplethorpe worked across collage, sculpture, assemblage, Polaroid photography, and hybrid objects that combined photographic images with found and constructed elements. These works emerged from the experimental culture of downtown New York and demonstrate his early interest in the body, sexuality, ritual, fetish, religious imagery, and the transformation of photographic material into a physical object. Contemporary descriptions of the catalogue emphasize precisely this range, from conceptual and multimedia pieces to explicitly sexual photographs.

Published two years after Mapplethorpe’s death, Early Works: 1970–1974 accompanied Robert Miller Gallery’s focused 1991 exhibition of the same title and helped establish this formative body of work within the posthumous understanding of his career. The catalogue is especially valuable because it isolates a period that is often compressed within broader Mapplethorpe surveys. Seen independently, these works clarify that his later photographic precision did not emerge fully formed: it developed from sustained experimentation with material, presentation, erotic imagery, and the relationship between photograph and object. The book therefore functions not simply as an exhibition catalogue but as a primary reference for understanding the origins of Mapplethorpe’s mature aesthetic.