Appreciation and desire: The male nude in the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe

Abstract

The representations of male bodies in Robert Mapplethorpe's nudes invite viewers to assume divergent and potentially contesting receptive stances. These different responses are enabled by the structural ambiguities of the photographs themselves. Mapplethorpe's male nudes appropriate past images and associations that evoke the canonical, classical genre of the nude as well as the artist's past work to present his models simultaneously as formal objects of appreciation and erotic objects of desire. These differing yet concurrent depictions entail corresponding degrees of distance and intimacy on the part of the viewer. In this light, Mapplethorpe's male nudes elucidate how textual ambiguity invites different modes of reception. The tensions in the photographs do not resolve themselves, nor do they offer the viewer synthetic clues.

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