off-topic: my avatar
^Heh!
Youngest, it's a Polaroid self-portrait by one of my exactly eight heroes, Robert Mapplethorpe. From 1972 to 1975, he did a bunch of Polaroid self-portraits of himself (the vast majority of them were taken in 1973). The Polaroid camera had just come out and a lot of young/new artists were using them to experiment with nude self-portraiture and other naughty-ish things, since it was the first mass-market camera with film that didn't have to be developed.
Mapplethorpe did a couple quite-small shows with his Polaroids, right at the start of his career, but they were basically something he completely forgot about. Around the same time he was also making jewelry - elaborate necklaces and bracelets - another practice he discarded. He decided that jewelry and Polaroids were too pop, that they weren't serious, and that he wanted to be known as a serious artist. (Anyone familiar with the work that made Mapplethorpe famous knows it draws heavily on extremely classical compositions.)
So, quite literally, Robert threw his Polaroids in a drawer and never did anything with them. They sat in a desk of his for years, and then were transferred to some box somewhere when he died.
In 2001, Arena Editions published a book of his Polaroid self-portraits, called Autoportrait. It's out of print now but can generally be got quite cheap, maybe $25 or so, and it's a luscious book, beautiful paper, 63 photographs, wonderfully done. It listed at $65 originally. I opened a copy for the first time in the Times Square Virgin Megastore in October 2001 and gasped out loud. I very nearly fell on the floor. For me, they're the best work he ever did. Ten million times better than the work that made him famous. And he never meant for anyone to see them. He didn't care about them. He never meant to do anything with them.
My avatar's a crop of one of them. Here's the full picture.
I personally find Robert Mapplethorpe to be the most attractive person who ever lived, and in the 'What's your fantasy?' thread over in Off-Topic, my answer came easily+immediately: to look exactly like Robert Mapplethorpe in 1973. Here's one of his Polaroids showing his face. Most showing his body are sexual in nature.
love
math+
