Mapplethorpe: Look At The Pictures, film review: a documentary that tackles sexuality

American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe combines reckless hedonism in his private life with drive and ruthlessness in his professional career

Watching this documentary, you can understand just why the brilliant American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe so upset and enraged censors and right-wing US politicians like Jesse Helms. He took a subversive and fetishistic pleasure in tackling sexuality in his work.

His pictures of fisting and of S&M and bondage may have seemed pornographic but he approached this “loaded” subject matter with the same extraordinary artistry and genius for framing that he brought to his pictures of flowers or his portraits of celebrities. This film does an excellent job of chronicling the New York bohemia of the 1970s and 1980s in which Mapplethorpe was such a pivotal figure.

The photographer combined reckless hedonism in his private life with drive and ruthlessness in his professional career. “He wanted to be a legend,” we are told again and again - and the filmmakers show just how single-mindedly he set about becoming one.

Randy Barbato, Fenton Bailey, 108 mins, featuring: Debbie Harry, Fran Leibowitz, Brooke Shields, Edward Mapplethorpe