I have to confess that I came to Frank Pierson’s film Dirty Pictures (2000) with some serious biases. As my readers from late in the last century know, I never joined the Robert Mapplethorpe fan club. I still consider him a skilled portraitist but a second-drawer neo-pictorialist, with a sideline in directorial imagery concentrating on the gay SM scene. So I never understood the extraordinary fuss made over him and his work by his admirers.
Dirty Pictures on DVD
(Full disclosure: An encounter with Mapplethorpe and his lover-cum-patron Sam Wagstaff, and Wagstaff’s subsequent attempt to get me fired from my New York University adjunct teaching position as a “Marxist,” did not dispose me kindly toward either of them as individuals, though I do my best to sort such baggage out and set it aside in my writing.)
Moreover, I don’t much care for the docudrama as a filmic form. I’d rather watch a standard documentary film or video than a staged reenactment of an event, anytime. I know how the story comes out, after all, it’s already on the record; in that case, I prefer journalism to fictionalization or dramaturgy. I distrust projects that blur the line between sociology and theater. Call me old-school.
So this film starts out with several strikes against it, from my standpoint. It tells, or more precisely re-tells, the story of Dennis Barrie, the director of the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center (CAC), who in 1990 went on trial for showing the Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective “The Perfect Moment,” organized by the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) in Philadelphia. This case, Cincinnati v. Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, constituted one of the key battles in what became known as the Culture Wars, which I won’t try to recap here; plenty of sources on that exist for anyone too young to remember those days or somehow oblivious to them. (The Wikipedia entry on this subject is a good place to start.) To make a long story short, Barrie and the CAC were acquitted of all charges by the jury, a legal precedent with free-expression ramifications that make my assessment of Mapplethorpe’s achievement pale by comparison.
James Woods as Dennis Barrie. © Showtime Networks Inc. - All Rights Reserved
To my surprise, I’ve ended up appreciating the film. Released on cable TV’s Showtime channel in 2000, a decade after the event, it’s distant enough in time to take a measured, meditative look at this cultural moment. Ilene Chaiken’s screenplay hews fairly closely to the facts (at least as I understand them). I haven’t compared the public statements and courtroom proceedings as depicted here with the actual news stories and transcripts, but they come close to what I recall as widely circulated quotations from those sources.
I could have done without the subtext concerning the effect of this struggle on Barrie’s home life with his wife and two young sons, but it was probably inevitable; you wouldn’t have gotten this film made in Hollywood without it. And it does make the point — a crucial and often-ignored one — that the experience of getting censored (or having an emotional involvement with someone who gets censored) has a deeply demoralizing effect. I can attest to that from first-hand experience.
Robert Mapplethorpe, The Perfect Moment, catalogue 1988
The film departs from the cookie-cutter docudrama mode in two ways. First, by incorporating bits of archival film footage of George Bush, Sr., Pat Buchanan, Sen. Al d’Amato, and Sen. Jessie Helms fulminating against Mapplethorpe, the National Endowment for the Arts, and other spawn of the devil, augmented by passages from a film of Mapplethorpe himself talking. Second, by breaking the frame periodically for short snippets of interviews made especially for this film, featuring some of the actual protagonists, as well as some observers of and commentators on the cultural scene of the time, from various sides of the spectrum: Fran Lebowitz, Bill T. Jones, Mary Boone, Salman Rushie, William F. Buckley, Susan Sarandon. This reminds me, both formally and stylistically, of what Warren Beatty did in his 1981 film Reds; it’s effective in giving the viewer an ongoing sense that the film is grounded in fact and intends to consider the multiple perspectives, pro and con.
I think it achieves that goal. Moreover, old-school though I am in relation to the docudrama mode, I have to take into account the fact that the majority of the present generation (now two full generations younger than me) doesn’t really consider a historical event to have happened unless they’ve seen a color movie of it — and not just a color documentary film in the classic mode, but a fictionalized version with a cast and director and ace cinematography. World War II for them isn’t William L. Shirer plus Margaret Bourke-White at Buchenwald; it’s Band of Brothers plus Schindler’s List. They’re willing to learn about history, politics, current events; it’s just that Michael Moore has to drive an ice-cream truck around Capitol Hill to get their attention. (I think of this as Dead Poets Society Syndrome, but that’s another discussion.)
To his credit, director Frank Pierson doesn’t shy away from discussion of the content of Mapplethorpe’s imagery — unlike the expert witnesses called by the CAC/Barrie defense team, who come across as studies in elitist obscurantism. (That’s particularly true of Janet Kardon of the ICA, who curated the show.) Pierson also insists on showing many of the toughest and most controversial Mapplethorpe gay/SM images in the film, full-screen, some of them more than once. He also doesn’t flinch at pointing up the art world’s pandemic insularity, or the snobbism embedded in its circle-the-wagons response to the Culture Wars, or the dazzle-’em-with-bullshit quality of the art-world experts’ testimony.
Craig T. Nelson as Sheriff Simon Leis © Showtime Networks Inc. - All Rights Reserved
The cast, headed by James Woods as curator Barrie and Craig T. Nelson as County Sheriff Simon Leis, does a thoroughly workmanlike job of making their characters plausible and engaging. I don’t know Barrie, so I can’t speak to the logic of casting Woods in that role; but while I think he’s a fine actor he always exudes an undercurrent of self-serving amorality that doesn’t stand his character in particularly good stead here. However, he received several nominations for his performance, and the film won a 2001 Golden Globe award for Best Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for TV. I think it deserved it, for taking on a charged and difficult subject and keeping the focus mainly on the issues involved, or at least on the way those issues were understood at the time. All in all, it treats its themes in an even-handed, thoughtful, and determinedly unsensationalized way.
That doesn’t make it a great film. But it’s a watchable one. It also includes material (those interviews and news clips) difficult or impossible to find elsewhere. The Culture Wars constituted one of the rare moments in American history in which photographs and photography took center stage in the national consciousness. It was the medium’s most “teachable moment” to date. I don’t think that moment got taught well. Many of its embedded lessons got overlooked or misrepresented, not least as a result of the art world’s reliance on formalist mumbo-jumbo to justify and defend work being challenged on its content.
With that said, if I wanted to take a class of students back to that moment, to teach it myself again today some two decades down the line, I might well start with this movie. Not my highest praise, I admit. I hope that, for Pierson and Chaiken and Woods and company, as Randy Newman sings in a very different context, “Now that may not be love/But it is all right.”
Although I haven’t seen this film, I wanted to relay some information I gained about Mapplethorpe.
Shortly before his death I was able to publish two interviews with the photographer in two magazine for which I served as a staff editor. The interviews were published in Camera & Darkroom and Collector’s Photography.
As a result of working on these pieces, I was fortunate to have a collection of Mapplethorpe’s original portraits printed on 11×14 paper in my possession for about 1 year. I used to take them out and study them frequently. They were stunning. As most people probably know, he didn’t print his own work (at least late in his life); these prints, made by his printer (Tom Baril, I think), were among the finest black-and-white prints I have ever seen. I had the opportunity to speak with Baril later, and learned that there was really nothing exceptional about the chemistry, paper, or technique of the printing. Baril was (and probably still is) just one of the finest black-and-white printers to ever enter the darkroom.
The thing I really wanted to communicate here, however, came out of my communication with Mapplethorpe’s brother, Ed Maxey. (He is now known as Edward Mapplethorpe). In a conversation that took place after Robert’s death, in the late 1980s or perhaps early 1990s, Maxey told me that the homoerotic work of his brother was never meant to be seen by the public. It seems that when Robert wrote the documents creating his his trust, he left all of his work to the trust. According to what Maxey told me at the time, Mapplethorpe meant this to include all his commercial and fine-art work (the latter primarily portraits and still lives). Maxey explained that Mapplethorpe shot the homoerotic work mostly just to be shared privately between himself, his subjects, and some other people with whom he indulged in that lifestyle. He never meant for any of it to be shown publicly.
The people who ran the trust took the trust’s reach to mean every photo Mapplethorpe had ever taken. At some point after his death the people from the trust came into his house and studio and took all the family scrapbooks, the erotic work, and every other photo and put them into the trust.
It’s a good cautionary tale for anyone with a body of work that they wish to leave for public consumption. Be careful how you write your will or trust. As a result of the way the people in charge of the trust decided to market Mapplethorpe’s legacy, he became the poster child for anti-gay forces rather than being remembered as an amazing portrait photographer with excellent black-and-white photographic skills.
In my opinion it is a sad commentary on how capitalism can pervert the world. When deciding what was more important, a few dollars now or Mapplethorpe’s reputation and legacy, there was no contest in the minds of the people who ran his trust.
Thanks to Thom Harrop for this recollection. I’m not in a position to verify or challenge the account therein of the actions of the Mapplethorpe Trust. I leave that to others, whose responses I welcome via the comment box below. (If the comment runs long. I may turn it into a separate Guest Post.)
I’l just say this: In my view, Mapplethorpe’s still lives break no new ground. They’re mere warmed-over pictorialism, elegant decorative art, nothing troubling, nothing you couldn’t put on the walls of an upscale hotel. From a formal standpoint, they represent no innovation; indeed, they’re devotedly conservative in that regard. Put the subject in the center of the frame, make it the largest object in the frame, place all the highlights on it, make it the most sharply focused object in the image, avoid any complex foreground-background relationships, reject any exploration of possible visual tensions across the picture plane or in relation to the edge of the frame . . . This approach is dominant throughout his body of work (though there are exceptions), utterly conventional, devoid of invention, no more creative than the way a 1950s commercial studio photographer would depict a suitcase for a luggage catalogue.
The portraits deploy exactly the same elementary visual strategies. But here I think Mapplethorpe’s ability to evoke telling performances from his subjects, in tandem with the superb printing, makes the result more distinctive and memorable. Most of his subjects, of course, were skilled and famous performers, comfortable with the camera and used to playing to it, to any of whose likenesses we bring all the baggage that goes with our familiarity with their public and (increasingly) private lives. So how much of the success of those portraits is his, and how much is theirs, remains up for grabs.
However, even if I grant Mapplethorpe all the credit for the portraits, and throw in the the still lives and figure studies, I still conclude that they’re not nearly sufficient to support and sustain an international reputation as a major figure in late-20th century photography. Absolutely nothing there that Edward Steichen and F. Holland Day hadn’t achieved 70 years earlier. Without the inclusion of the homoerotic work — and the spurious argument that he innovated by introducing this subject matter to photography — his oeuvre is simply that of a skilled studio photographer with artistic aspirations. In short, remove those images (and the high-profile bad-boy notoriety that goes with them) from the consideration of his accomplishment and the entire Mapplethorpe enterprise grinds to a screeching halt. By this I mean not only the trust’s marketing of his work but the curatorial and critical hyping thereof.
So it doesn’t surprise me that a strategic decision got made in favor of putting his homoerotic work into the mix. That didn’t happen entirely posthumously, as his brother implies in Harrop’s recounting. Mapplethorpe’s 1977 “Erotic Pictures” solo show at the Kitchen in New York City premiered his exploration of that theme, the X Portfolio of S&M images got published in 1978, and I remember seeing at least some of the other sexually explicit images in print, and on the walls of various exhibitions, before his 1989 death from AIDS. (The X Portfolio and other works on that theme appeared in his 1988 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the opening of which Mapplethorpe attended as one of his last public appearances.) Thus, by my standards, at least a chunk of the explicit S&M material became a redacted component of his body of work with his clear approval during his lifetime.
Be that as it may, if Mapplethorpe truly didn’t intend that work, or at least his entire unredacted output, to go into his trust and get published and exhibited, then this is indeed a cautionary tale for photographers — who now, more than ever, need to consider what will happen to their output in the event of their demise, and to leave specific, detailed instructions indicating what is for public consumption, what’s to get preserved as study material, and what’s to be destroyed.
P.S. Regarding his name, Edward Mapplethorpe has this to say: “I was once included in a group show that Robert was also in, and he had a fit, made me change my name [to Edward Maxey]. It was almost like becoming another person. I mean, had I eventually evolved to the point where that had been my choice, well, that would have been one thing. But it was sort of forced upon me, so yeah, there’s some resentment there.”
I can’t say that I am biased towards the work of Mapplethorpe. If anything, I would thank him for exposing a subculture that I was aware of but not so thoroughly.
I came to New York in 1974 from the midwest, and was honestly clueless in relation to any level of this culture. When I first came to New York, I stayed at the YMCA on West 34th Street (in room 975, I remember). One night, in the middle of the night, I had to go to the bathroom. I was half asleep as I walked down the hallway and entered the large communal bathroom — at which point I saw 4 legs under one stall. I thought to myself, “What is that?” The door opened and two guys said to me, “Want to come in?”
Well, I ran back to my room, frightened. Yes, this was way out of my zone of understanding, and it had an influence on how I felt any time I used a public restroom after that.
Sex is always a great subject, whether it’s good sex or bad sex. Now, Mapplethorpe took us to a place we really didn’t want to go. This is nothing in comparison to the doings of to the ancient Greeks or Romans, but by and large we have a tendency to deliberately forget our history.
I have not seen “Dirty Pictures,” but I have on several occasions seen the work of Mapplethorpe. In the beginning I saw his B&W prints and thought they were terrible — not because of the imagery but due to the quality of the prints. As time went by he or others made great prints of high quality. As I said, they were out of my zone of understanding, but as a social statement about life in New York in the mid-70’s and later, that was their strength.
Who out there doesn’t miss life in New York at that time? Now you walk through Times Square and find lawn chairs with people sleeping in them. No pimps, whores, cops busting heads — just people in lawn chairs. It’s important to photograph the underbelly of a society, even if it takes you out of your comfort zone.
I don’t consider myself biased against Mapplethorpe’s work; I just don’t rate it highly. I do agree with Naughton that his work in the S&M culture has sociological value. But other photographers also explored that territory, some of them starting before Mapplethorpe came on the scene, some of them making images no less confrontational and explicit than his.
Mapplethorpe’s erotic work needs to be seen and understood within the context of a continuum of what my colleague David Steinberg calls “sexual photography” — imagery that specifically looks at human sexual behavior — and then in relation to several subsets of that collective project, including the S&M and gay components of it. That means considering him alongside people like Tilo Keil, Pierre Molinier, Charles Gatewood, Barbara Nitke, Michael Rosen, Arthur Tress, and numerous others.
That’s a movement in photography (or at least a tendency) that emerged into increasingly high visibility starting in the late 1960s. Understanding it as a cultural phenomenon tied to such energies as women’s liberation, gay liberation, general anti-censorship activity, and other social shifts tells us a lot more about photography’s relationship to culture than we achieve by singling out one picture-maker and pretending that he arrived sui generis.
As someone who was curating a non-profit photography center in Cincinnati in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I had a front-row seat for the persecution and prosecution of the Contemporary Arts Center as the key battle in the 1989 declared “Culture Wars”. There is a lot to write about that time and the series of events leading to the trial and eventual acquittal, as well as those proceeding from it, some still largely concealed.
I did not participate in the trial directly as a witness, although I was the only photography curator and critic in town. I was told that this is because I had long hair and did not run a significant enough center. The defense was looking for very conservative representatives of impressive institutions. The prosecution was looking for yahoos (and this was part of their undoing).
The Woods portrayal of Dennis Barrie in Dirty Pictures, I heard at the time, was reworked by Woods himself to make the character more appealing and heroic. I don’t know whether anyone has any verifiable support for this assertion. Certainly the film presents Barrie in an heroic light, inflating some things, leaving out others. The representation of the stress of the trial costing Barrie his marriage never considers the effect of a director surrounding himself with nearly entirely an attractive young female staff and his alleged (and not so secret) extra-marital involvements with them; that’ll bust up a marriage pretty fast.
On the positive side, I was told by one of the attorneys in the trial that the dialogue of the courts scenes was lifted verbatim from the transcripts, and thus, though selectively edited, is quite useful.
So I can’t get on the film’s bandwagon very comfortably, but I do have to agree almost entirely with your assessment of Mapplethorpe as an artist and his elevation into some peculiar photo pantheon. I considered him — and called him this in print — essentially a second-rate copyist. (This also may have played a role in not being selected as a witness).
I thought his early portraits were his best work, before he became enamored of the studio and stark black. His appeal seemed to rest on a stylistic blending of mid-period Hollywood lighting applied to Hellenistic sculpture, just using live actor/models, significantly eroticized. Mix two safe, revered familiars with a dash of forbidden and you appear to have something challenging and new but readily accessible and popular. It reminded me a bit of what George Lucas accomplished with Star Wars: one part Flash Gordon (Emperor Ming), lots of Marvel Comics (Fantastic Four and Doctor Doom) and some of TV’s Lost in Space (Dr. Smith and the robot B9M3), mixed up into what seems both familiar and new, tasty and instantly digestible.
I think what was most significant about Mapplethorpe as a photographer was his elevation of the phallus (pun not entirely unintended) as subject. This is where the work’s biggest impact occurred, as I recall. I guess the time was right. And I don’t buy the line that Mapplethorpe wanted his erotic work kept hidden; far from it. He even wrote about this work as pornographic, saying he wanted to make it to understand and hopefully harness the power of porn (quite the opposite of what Dennis Barrie constantly repeated to the press, that all the work he was exhibiting was “art, not porn,” despite knowing better).
I wanted to pose a question about over-ratedness, and this observation in particular. “From a formal standpoint, they [he Mapplethorpe portraits] represent no innovation; indeed, they’re devotedly conservative in that regard. Put the subject in the center of the frame, make it the largest object in the frame, place all the highlights on it, make it the most sharply focused object in the image, avoid any complex foreground-background relationships, reject any exploration of possible visual tensions across the picture plane or in relation to the edge of the frame . . . This approach is dominant throughout his body of work (though there are exceptions), utterly conventional, devoid of invention, no more creative than the way a 1950s commercial studio photographer would depict a suitcase for a luggage catalogue.” So what’s you opinion of Avedon, and don’t you see parallels to Mapplethorpe? (I thought Avedon’s early, extra-studio work also his most interesting, and later work even more formulaic than the Divine Mr. M).
The medium’s perfect (most teachable) moment still has a lot to teach and there are still stories to tell.
P.S. I am curious about the Maxey/Mapplethorpe sidebar. How can your brother force you to change your own name? I almost understand, reading Jon Van Meter’s piece in New York magazine, “How Edward Mapplethorpe Got His Name Back.” Unfortunately, I felt some resentment toward Edward myself, as he seemed to be schnorring off his brother’s fame; now I feel rather sorry for him, and wish him well.