Wagstaff before and after mapplethorpe a biography

Gefter, Philip (Wagstaff, Samuel; Mapplethorpe, Robert)

ISBN:
New York, NY: Liveright Publishing Corporation/ W.W. Norton & Company, First Edition. Hardcover. "Samuel Wagstaff, the legendary curator, collector, and patron of the arts, emerges as a cultural visionär in this groundbreaking biography. Even today remembered primarily as the mentor and lover of Robert Mapplethorpe, the once infamous photographer, Wagstaff, in fact, had an incalculable- and largely overlooked- influence on the world of contemporary art and photography, and on the evolution of gay identity in the latter part of the twentieth century." (from front flap) A comprehensive, analytical biography of Samuel J. Wagstaff (), the American aristocrat who evolved into one of the foremost influencers of later twentieth-century art & was famously the lifetime companion & promoter of Robert Mapplethorpe (), the great & provocative American photographer. Bot

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Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe: A Biography

January 6,

In all honesty, I had little knowledge of Sam Wagstaff coming into this book. My eye stuck on the “Mapplethorpe” in the title, the cover’s photo of the young man so loved in Patti Smith’s Just Kids, her hippie soul twin, and immediately wanted to see another side of Robert Mapplethorpe’s life, another person on whom Robert acted as less of a foil than another half of a heart. Anyway, even if Mapplethorpe was the draw, I’m so glad I picked up this book / finally opened my eyes to the major cultural and art-world shifter that was Sam Wagstaff.
Brought up in wealth, luxury and almost ushered straight into the inner circle of suits, maybe nothing’s more impressive about the direction Sam took in life than the fact that, so easily, he could have taken a direction centered on money, summer homes and the typical white male checklist. But instead, bored bygd the corporate life of advertising he tried out in his younger years–

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On Philip Gefter’s Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe

Gefter argues that there is a relationship between the queer gaze and a particularly influential period for the history of photography, as told through Wagstaff’s story. Here we feature writer Kira Josefsson&#;s review of Gefter’s book. This article also appears in Issue 9 of the Aperture Photography App, a new biweekly publication from Aperture: click here to download the free app.

In s New York, when homosexuality was still punishable by law, it was an especially risky act for a man to let his eyes linger on another man in public. But photographs enjoyed privately could be a safe space for the queer gaze. As author and critic Philip Gefter argues in his biography Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe, it was not an accident that so many photography collectors active during this period were gay men. The book charts the life of Sam Wagstaff, best-known as the lover and patron of Robert Mapplethorpe, and set