Robert Mapplethorpe

Robert Mapplethorpe appears in the diary as a photographer moving through the same art and celebrity circles as Andy Warhol. His clearest professional role is behind the camera: he photographs Grace Jones for Interview. The entries also connect him to Warhol’s wider portrait-making world, where photographic images were selected, altered, enlarged, and translated into silkscreen paintings. Warhol’s changing observations of Mapplethorpe’s health give their intermittent encounters a sobering undertone, though the diary does not establish a close personal relationship between them.

Photography and Interview

In July 1984, Warhol went to SoHo for a photographic session in which Mapplethorpe was to photograph Grace Jones for Interview. Keith Haring was doing Jones’s makeup, and Warhol remained at the shoot for three hours. The scene brings together three distinct functions in the magazine’s image-making: Mapplethorpe behind the camera, Haring shaping the look, and Jones as the subject. The shoot was part of Interview’s ongoing traffic between celebrity, photography, and public image.

Warhol’s account situates the session within a longer stretch of waiting and movement around the shoot. Grace Jones was expected to be late, so the group passed time before going to Mapplethorpe’s Bond Street studio. After the session, Warhol went home to watch the Olympic opening ceremony on television, then later attended Jones’s dinner. Mapplethorpe is not described as directing the social evening; his role in the entry is specifically that of the photographer whose studio hosts the work.

Portraiture and Image-Making

Mapplethorpe’s photographic work sits beside Warhol’s elaborate commissioned-portrait process. For a portrait, Warhol began by taking about sixty Polaroids with a Polaroid Big Shot. He selected four images for a screen printer to convert into positive images on eight-by-ten-inch acetate, then chose and cropped one, cosmetically altering features to make the subject appear more attractive. The chosen image was enlarged to a forty-by-forty-inch acetate, from which the printer made a silkscreen.

The photographic image was only one layer of the finished portrait. Assistants prepared canvas in flesh-toned shades; Warhol traced the enlarged image onto it, painted areas such as hair, eyes, lips, ties, or jackets, and aligned the silkscreen with those colors. Small shifts between the screened image and painted areas produced the portraits’ characteristic unsettled appearance. The diary does not say Mapplethorpe participated in this procedure, but his role as a photographer for Interview belongs to the same wider culture in which images were constructed, selected, and circulated rather than simply recorded.

Encounters and Changing Health

Warhol’s impressions of Mapplethorpe’s health change across two brief social encounters. At dinner at Odeon after seeing Jean-Michel Basquiat’s show at Mary Boone Gallery, Warhol noted that Mapplethorpe was present and that something seemed wrong with his appearance; he wondered whether Mapplethorpe had lost his looks or was ill. The observation is uncertain and is recorded as Warhol’s impression, not as a diagnosis.

By a later dinner at Francesco Clemente’s, Warhol found Mapplethorpe looking healthier than he had ever seen him, with color in his face. He hoped Mapplethorpe would recover and speculated that a new drug was being tried on him. Mapplethorpe said he had recently photographed Patti Smith, but the pictures had gone to Vogue rather than Interview. That exchange places his work across competing magazine outlets while Warhol’s concern makes health an unresolved thread in their encounters; the diary offers no confirmed outcome.