Today’s history/respect lesson: A Master of Photography. Robert Mapplethorpe, (1946-1989).
Born in New York, Mapplethorpe’s photos ranged from sexually explicit to sublimely beautiful. He gained recognition in the 1970s with elegantly composed, (and back then, sometimes shocking) male nudes. Throughout his career he also made portraits of his friends and celebrities in the fields of music, art, literature, and entertainment and took still lifes of flowers that were simple in concept but exquisitely detailed.
Himself a victim of AIDS, he established a foundation to focus on medical research for the disease. Click here for a gallery of his works.