What Robert Mapplethorpe taught me about masculinity

The act of looking and being looked at is notoriously complicated between men and women. When I was a teenage girl, Robert Mapplethorpe’s images both scared and excited me; they presented such a powerful vision of masculinity, by men and for men, whether through the eroticised gaze of the male photographer poring over the nude body, or the macho bulges of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s youthful form, flexing into Adonis-like poses that play into the super-hetero gaze of frat houses and locker rooms.

For me, they conveyed an idealised vision of masculinity that felt out of reach. Mapplethorpe’s men were more overtly sexual than the bodies mainstream pop culture seemed to want me to be attracted to, and more smoothed and buffed than those I’d seen in real life. These brawny, polished men were not who I was supposed to be looking at – or at least, admit I looked at.

Through Mapplethorpe’s lens, the male form becomes sculpture and landscape. At times its muscular ripples take on the firm smoothness of marble. At others, bent-over buttocks evoke the sweeping mounds of hills. He delighted in his bodies, relishing every curve and crevice. ‘Subject, Object, Image’, a new exhibition at Alison Jacques, holds together both his artistic mastery and at times the problematic objectification of his subjects.

“I’m trying to make sculpture without having to sculpt,” he said in 1983. “I’m trying to get the head in just the right spot where everything looks perfect. I’m looking for perfection in form… It’s no different from one subject to the next.” His images invite looking, but they also ask audiences to consider what it is to be looked at. His men are often highly exposed, and his obsession with photographing Black men in particular has been scrutinised in more recent years.

Many images teeter between ravenous hunger and detachment. In Milton White (1983), for example, the erect end of a penis poking out of a pair of boxer shorts is pornographic, but is photographed so symmetrically and sculpturally that it almost surpasses its erotic intent.

I was 19 when I first posed naked for a photographer. My agent told me he was an icon – as always seemed to be the case when they were convincing me to be photographed nude – and it was not an opportunity to be missed. The vast majority of nudity as a model felt devoid of sexual tension, as did this shoot. My body was moved and placed to get the best light. In this case, objectification did not mean guilt-free sexual gratification for the photographer (at least, so it appeared), but more that he had a willing prop in his studio. The personality and the desires of the looked at fall into the background in these situations, as limbs are picked up and put down, hot lights are shifted around, and only the make-up artist remembers to hand the model a gown as they stand shivering in between shots.

I imagined my experience to be a specifically female one at the time. Looking at Mapplethorpe’s photographs, I saw an equality, a meeting of virility. I projected a strength onto the male body; a psychological power that matched their physical forms and negated any potential for vulnerability and fragility. Looking through his sculptural depictions this week – two tongue-in-cheek works actually show marble structures – I wondered who the people behind the perfect exteriors were. There are moments where Mapplethorpe shifts from his sculptural depiction of the body, when the object becomes the subject, and the tenderness of his Herculean bodies comes to the fore. In one beautiful piece, two men embrace, curling around one another as if becoming a single entity.

Mapplethorpe didn’t see himself as existing totally outside of his subjects. “If I am at a party, I want to be at the party,” he once said. “Too many photographers use the camera to avoid participating in things. They become professional observers.” But it’s his party at the end of the day. In all its complicated, stimulating glory.