Robert Mapplethorpe

flush-mounted, signed, dated, and editioned '5/5' in pencil in the margin, signed, titled, and dated in pencil and with the credit and copyright/reproduction rights stamps, signed and dated in ink, on the reverse, in a frame designed to the photographer's specifications, 1975 (Mapplethorpe, p. 54; Certain People, unpaginated)

This print is in generally excellent condition. The edges are slightly rubbed, and the corners are bumped. There is some very faint, light soiling in the margins near the edges. Two Robert Miller Gallery, New York, labels, are on the reverse of the frame.
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Robert Mapplethorpe took this now iconic photograph of his friend and muse Patti Smith early in his career, before his reputation as a photographer was established.  The photograph was made in the One Fifth Avenue penthouse apartment of Mapplethorpe's lover and patron, the collector and curator Sam Wagstaff.  Painted white and sparsely furnished, the apartment was an ideal space to use as a photographic studio, and Mapplethorpe had come to learn how the rooms' lighting changed throughout the day.  Consequently, he planned the timing of the shoot carefully, and this portrait was made on the afternoon of an intermittently cloudy day that found Mapplethorpe struggling with his then-limited technical abilities as well as the rapidly shifting light.  The photograph, nonetheless, was a success, and marked the beginning of Mapplethorpe's mature style of portraiture. 

The photograph was very much a collaboration between photographer and subject.  Patti Smith had burst upon the New York music scene in the early 1970s, causing a sensation with her explosive performances in which verbal and stylistic allusions to sources as diverse as Arthur Rimbaud and Mick Jagger were the norm.  She was a wholly new kind of rocker, and her first full-length album, Horses, was eagerly anticipated.  Smith insisted that her long-time friend and collaborator Robert Mapplethorpe shoot the photograph for the album's cover.  While Mapplethorpe chose the place and time to make the photograph, Smith prepared her clothing and appearance carefully.  The look was androgynous, but without the glitz that androgyny was currently being accorded at the time by the likes of David Bowie and Marc Bolan.  In a decade when the colorful fantasy-inspired cover designs of Roger Dean were considered state-of-the-art, Mapplethorpe's black-and-white cover image for Horses was thoroughly unconventional.  Executives at Smith's record company, Arista, voiced strong opposition to the photograph, claiming that it would kill the album's sales.  Smith's contract with the company, however, allowed her complete artistic control of the album's contents and packaging, and the photograph was used.  Smith went so far as to refuse permission for the company's art department to alter or retouch the image in any way.

The photograph's publication, on the album and in the attendant publicity, gave Mapplethorpe wide exposure and provided a huge boost to his career.  The image was, for many people, their first encounter with Mapplethorpe's work.  Horses came to be one of the most influential albums of the 1970s, and set a template that would be followed by the punk rock movements just beginning at the time in New York and London.  Mapplethorpe's photograph has come to be indelibly linked with Smith's iconoclastic album and has become, arguably, his most famous portrait.