From Library Journal
Fritscher's brutally frank memoir of his ex-lover, confidant, and colleague, drawn from the author's personal documents, seeks to strip away the notoriety surrounding the defiant photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. As editor and writer for the gay magazine Drummer, Fritscher was the first to publish Mapplethorpe's highly charged camera shots depicting a seamy world of "leathersex," sadomasochism, taboos, and fetishes. Here, Fritscher graphically portrays the masculine subculture of the homosexual community that Mapplethorpe inhabited until his death from AIDS in 1989, at age 42. He also discusses the censorship of Mapplethorpe's work within the mainstream gay community. Interestingly, Mapplethorpe's bitterly controversial photographs, taken during the turbulent 1970s and 1980s-during the period of Watergate, Vietnam, Patti Hearst, sexual liberation, and political deceptions-have become more a documentary of our times. Recommended for popular culture collections.Joan Levin, MLS, ChicagoCopyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Midwest Book Review
The then-undiscovered camera artist Mapplethorpe asked Drummer Magazine editor Fritscher to examine his portfolio, resulting in an assignment and subsequent fame. The two later became colleagues and lovers: this biography of Mapplethorpe provides a personal first-person account of his life based on a review of journals and a personal knowledge going beyond the interview stage.
Book Description
A memoir of the famous photographer by a former friend.
From the Publisher
Regarding MAPPLETHORPE, the LIBRARY JOURNAL said "...brutally frank memoir...a documentary of our times. Recommended for popular culture collections." The NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS said "MAPPLETHORPE is a personal memoir, a polemic, and several others things besides."
From the Author
"I first wrote about my friend Robert Mapplethorpe in 1977, and have often written about his photography, his person, his psyche, his fame, and his lifestyle in the larger context of the wonderful, rarified times in which we lived before AIDS. I want Robert to be remembered as a person, not just a cause celebre. In my memoir, I gathered together a group of Robert's friends and I invited them to sit together, so to speak, in a circle and keen what we lost. My book is in many ways the Irish wake that Robert Michael Mapplethorpe deserved, sort of like the difference between the public mourning of Princess Diana and the private grief of her friends at whatever remove from the palace. I had the joy of spending time with painter-photographer GEORGE DUREAU; and of interviewing photographers such as JOEL-PETER WITKIN to whom I gave the honor of the last word in the book. Many people hated Robert because he became rich and famous and told artists not to live in any ghetto. Unlike some of the bourgeois writing about Robert, I was not afraid to address the politically incorrect issues of race, gender, scatalogy, and satanism. I am not a Catholic-raised little girl writing scary reports of a world whose premises I do not understand. Huh! I fully understand! I pulled no punches in my account, but I also let ellipses happen with delicacy because I care about the other versions of Robert Mapplethorpe that can be told by his other intimates like the rock-poet PATTI SMITH, and his house/model, JACK WALLS. All of us realize that Robert notoriously kept his friends apart in life, so they couldn't compare notes. My reminiscence, a critic recently wrote, is in some respects a sicker, darker version of a kind of MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF EVIL...AND EVIL. I'm very please when filmmakers, both dramatic and documentary, consult this book for the truly colorful details of Robert's life in that epoch. Actually, I loved him...."
From the Inside Flap
Just as F. Scott Fitzgerald immortalized the Roaring '20s, Jack Fritscher, Robert Mapplethorpe's intimate friend and lover, captures the essence of the tumultuous '70s. Against a backdrop of riotous pop culture and gay life in America, this uncensored memoir offers a candid view of Robert Mapplethorpe who died of AIDS at age 42. Women like Susan Sarandon, Joan Didion, and Yoko Ono loved him. Actors like Richard Gere and Arnold Schwarzenegger posed for his camera. Politicians like Jesse Helms hated him. Mapplethorpe stopped the censorious U.S. Congress in its tracks, occasioning the destruction of the National Endowment for the Arts. Mapplethorpe became a cause celebre, and this book reveals the person behind the sensational headlines.
This book is based on the author's detailed journals and Jack Fritscher creates a fresh, fast-paced account that hooks the reader like a page-turning novel. Fritscher's is not the only voice speaking; he introduces revealing first-person interviews with artists and personalities who were also Mapplethorpe's friends; the photographers George Dureau and Joel-Peter Witkin, the performance artists Camille O'Grady and Robert Opel who streaked the Academy Awards and who were the rivals to Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe; and the gallery owner, Holly Solomon who gave Mapplethorpe his first show.
The biography-memoir started when the undiscovered Mapplethorpe flew to San Francisco in 1977 to ask Fritscher, then editor of DRUMMER magazine, to look at his portfolio. Fritscher, recognizing Mapplethorpe's talent, assigned, designed, and supervised his first cover. They later became friends, colleagues, and lovers and peeled open the shocking leather underground for Mapplethorpe's camera.
Mapplethorpe repeatedly asked Fritscher to write about him. Fritscher responded with features and fiction depicting the photographer. When Fritscher wrote the novel SOME DANCE TO REMEMBER, he dedicated it to Mapplethorpe, who read it in progress. The book was published to wide acclaim after Mapplethorpe's death in 1989. The NEW REPUBLIC named the book a classic on a peer with Gore Vidal's THE CITY AND THE PILLAR and James Baldwin's GIOVANNI'S ROOM. Regarding MAPPLETHORPE, the LIBRARY JOURNAL said "...brutally frank memoir...a documentary of our times. Recommended for popular culture collections." The NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS said "MAPPLETHORPE is a personal memoir, a polemic, and several others things besides."
MAPPLETHORPE: ASSAULT WITH A DEADLY CAMERA is a vivid, compelling story of a specific group of artists, friends, and lovers at a specific time in a specific place, living in a Golden Age before AIDS destroyed its lost civilization beneath a viral sea.
About the Author
JACK FRITSCHER'S 400 published short stories and feature articles have appeared in more than 25 magazines and in several anthologies of "Best-of-the-Year" stories. Of his 5 books of fiction, his best-selling novel, SOME DANCE TO REMEMBER, has been named by "THE NEW REPUBLIC" as a classic comparable to novels by Gore Vidal and James Baldwin, and yet is popular enough that a multiplicity of critics have called it "the gay GONE WITH THE WIND." His newest collection of fiction is RAINBOW COUNTY AND OTHER STORIES; his new novel for 1998 is the romantic comedy THE GEOGRAPHY OF WOMEN; his short-fiction collection for 1998 is CORPORAL IN CHARGE OF TAKING CARE OF CAPTAIN O'MALLEY AND OTHER STORIES. He is also the author of 4 nonfiction books, including this rather personally involved MAPPLETHORPE: ASSAULT WITH A DEADLY CAMERA; LOVE AND DEATH IN TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, his doctoral dissertation; the Anton LaVey centered POPULAR WITCHCRAFT; and the media-savvy TELEVISION TODAY. He is a founding member of the American Popular Culture Association, and has taught creative writing, journalism, and film for more than fifteen years at university. He is the recipient of both a Michigan Grant to the Arts and a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. (Robert Mapplethorpe himself received no government grants personally, despite the perception in the U.S. Congress in the NEA debacle.) Fritscher's coffee-table photography book, published in England and titled JACK FRITSCHER'S AMERICAN MEN, is a completely progressive kind of photo art, because his pictures (each one a titled short story) are of actual American males shot over a period of thirty years. There is no similarity to or influence from Mapplethorpe. Robert shot models in the controlled, formal environment of a studio. Fritscher shoots actual people from the hip, on the run, extemporaneously. He is deeply established artist who is writer, photographer, and video director whose existentially erotic work reflects sexuality, intellect, and real life lived in American popular culture.
Excerpted from Mapplethorpe : Assault With a Deadly Camera by JACK FRITSCHER, Ph.D. AMERICAN, HOMOSEXUALITY AND PHOTOGRAPHY, BLACK MEN AND PHOTOGRAPHY, WOMEN AND PHOTOGRAPHY. Copyright © 1994. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
"READER DISCRETION ADVISORY This pop culture memoir contains sex, lies, greed, perversion, murder, deceit, infidelity, drugs, sex, immorality, scatology, ambition, equivocation, character assassination, slander, blasphemy, aspersion, betrayal, distortion, racism, ungodliness, sodomy--and that's just the critics of Mapplethorpe."
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