Mercer - “Reading Racial Fetishism: The Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe”

In “Reading Racial Fetishism: The Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe,” Kobena Mercer explores the work of Robert Mapplethorpe. Mercer describes Mapplethorpe’s subject matter “gay, S/M ritual, lady bodybuilders, black men,” as representative of a “reworking of the old modernist tactic of “shock the bourgeoisie.” This subject matter, with a “vaguely transgressive quality…is given heightened allure by his evident mastery of photographic technology.”

Mercer begins to focus on the “photographs primary [representation of] a ‘look’.” A photographs ability to produce a ‘look,’ Mercer believes, in the case of Mapplethorpe’s Black Males, does not represent “the individual behind the lens, but as a cultural artifact that says something about certain ways in which white people “look” at black people and how in this way of looking, black male sexuality is perceived as something different, excessive, Other.”

This idea of the perception, by white people of black people, references earlier art historical representation in art of the “Other” or the orient during the 19^th century. Also, interestingly, the general representation of the other in this manner was often portrayed in a heightened sexual manner.

During the 19^th century, it was often through the gaze of the male artist the orient way depicted through the female nude. This representation of the female other often, unfairly, fabricated the orient as weak, and vulnerable in comparison to the powerful, and dominating west.

This representation through the guise of the male artist recalls to me the notion of the photograph as representative of the ‘look’. Mapplethorpe’s photograph, according to Mercer, function as a representation of the way in which white people sees black people, not necessarily how they truly are.