Reviews for Some Women

The average rating for Some Women based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-06-18 00:00:00 Anthony Bento Again, having just finished Patti Smith's Memoir of her life with Mapplethorpe, I looked at this book to see his work in black and white portraiture, his career in full swing. Just Kids focuses on their early life together, but it's clear early on he (and she) liked to take portraits'of Warhol, of his friend Wagstaff, of Patti Smith, many many others. His idea was not to mirror the time, but shape perceptions of the time, to create the time. There's 16 of the portraits on this site, so you can see the range of what is a kind of reflection of female beauty. On the surface, perused quickly, it might appear that this collection is a fairly typical bevy of beauties, celebrities--Isabella Rossellini, Grace Jones, Sigourney Weaver, Yoko Ono, Brooke Shields, Cyndi Lauper, Susan Sarandon, taken by a celebrity photographer. But this is more than a splash of People or Vogue magazine puff pieces. They reveal relationships, romance, a romance with women, and even as Joan Didion writes in her introduction to the volume, "a romance with art." They're often exquisite, powerful, the work of a master. Some of the best of them are of people I don't know, not famous people. But my main interest, having just read Smith's book, are'again, for me, for so many viewers'are Mapplethorpe's loving portraits of his primary lifelong subject, Patti Smith.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-02-22 00:00:00 William Burn Robert Mapplethorpe has had a major impact on the photographic view of human beauty and its statuesque, highly esthetic nature of it. When you see his photographs, it's rather the elegant, nostalgic and melancholic feel of the photos that make an impression, being less the part of objectification of the bodies or sexual take on it that could get your attention, like in the majority of todays magazines and fashion photography. His portraits are somehow radiant, with not many facial features to be seen. That's probably because the american photographer wanted these creations to appear more like paintings, even - symmetrical as he liked to say - with not so many lights and shadows, rather than to give them that kinda ordinary, conventional look of people being photographed. Joan Didion's annotation was a plus for this book, especially when it was said that the more you talk with others about your artistic process(Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mapplethorpe and others agreed on this), your creativity and inspiration, the smaller will the mistery around that particular passion get, the weaker the outcome of it all can be. Therefore, even if you don't realize it by talking about it, your personal satisfaction itself could diminish...