En hommage à Robert Mapplethorpe
Form, distance, and the afterlife of the photograph
En hommage à Robert Mapplethorpe
This small sequence is conceived as an explicit homage, and I want to be transparent about its lineage. The original photographs were made by a well-known Chicago street photographer whose eye for presence and vulnerability I have long admired. My intervention comes later: I have re-photographed those prints digitally, deliberately invoking the strategies of Richard Prince, and then re-edited them in a tonal and formal register indebted to Robert Mapplethorpe.
What draws me repeatedly to Mapplethorpe is not provocation for its own sake, but discipline: the severe economy of black and white, the way the body becomes architecture, surface, and volume all at once. In these images, the musculature, the cropped frames, and the assertive chiaroscuro are intended to echo that rigor. The body is not narrated psychologically; it is presented as form under pressure from light, shadow, and framing. Even the gesture of re-photographing is meant to reinforce that severity—introducing a subtle generational distance between the original moment and its present reappearance.
By working from photographs that are roughly four decades old, and then passing them through another technical and editorial filter, I am less interested in nostalgia than in continuity. The images carry with them a sense of accumulated time, a quiet sediment of looking, rather than a single, fixed instant. The grain, contrast, and minor degradations are not corrected away; they are allowed to stand as evidence of passage, translation, and reinterpretation.
Ultimately, this is an act of admiration rather than erasure. I am acknowledging the original photographer’s authorship, my own debt to Mapplethorpe’s visual grammar, and the conceptual provocation of re-photography as a legitimate form of dialogue. The result, I hope, reads not as pastiche, but as a respectful conversation across decades—one body, repeatedly seen, continually re-understood.
- Will Hazlitt, R9 Media Photo Collective
All images courtesy:
R9 Media Photo Collective
https://vero.co/r9media