American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe is one of the most celebrated photographers in the world of 20th century pop culture, with a somewhat controversial portfolio of black and white photography with a wide and varied focus of human and non-human subjects. As close friend and creative collaborator with singer and songwriter Patti Smith, some of his most famous works include his 1976 nude portrait of Patti, as well as the cover for her 1975 album ‘Horses’.

Mapplethorpe also explored the male and female nude, often in an S&M context, and such is one of the images featured in Haider Ackermann’s A#3, featuring the leather-belted groin and the muscled thigh of a bondage figure, entitled ‘Patrice’. These images were controversial in their time, even being rejected from an exhibition at the Corcoran in Washington, only months after Mapplethorpe’s death from AIDS in 1989. Another of Mapplethorpe’s images published in A#3 is the portrait of ‘Kaso Deklar’, wearing a moustache and eyepatch, which was also featured in a series of advertising campaigns for Helmut Lang.

Haider Ackermann has chosen an intriguing mix of Mapplethorpe’s images, with a narrative that runs the gamut of Mapplethorpe’s main thematic concerns – from the strength of an outstretched arm to the delicacy of entwined poppy stems and the wartime camp masculinity of ‘Kaso Deklar’, and the ageing jazz-age glamour of socialite Katherine Cebrian and dark sexuality of ‘Patrice’.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGlQ-fuPWv4[/youtube]