Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures
An examination of the life and work of the revered and controversial photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
27 October 1950, Morristown, New Jersey, USA
October 18, 1921 in Monroe, North Carolina, USA
5 June 1947, Glen Ellyn, Illinois, USA
31 December 1924, Grosse Pointe, Michigan, USA
January 18, 2017
The most revelatory facet of Look At The Pictures is what you hear: Bailey and Barbato accessed a trove of audio recordings in which Mapplethorpe discusses himself with disarming frankness.
September 21, 2016
This look at the life, times and legacy of the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe works just fine as an entry-level overview of the subject.
April 05, 2016
Look at the Pictures: It restores a sense of the forbidden to Mapplethorpe that's been lost in the years of worship.
August 08, 2016
Despite some moving contributions from family members, particularly Mapplethorpe's younger brother Edward, the film never really gets anywhere near its subject.
April 04, 2016
Look at the Pictures mirrors what Mapplethorpe did with his own life and career: It uses the pictures to tell a version of Robert Mapplethorpe while leaving us with the nagging feeling that there was much more to him than met the eye.
April 19, 2016
The thing you learn from this in-depth doc is how much of a trail he blazed.
April 01, 2016
Though an undoubtedly fascinating journey into the artistic mind (and the 1970s and 80s New York City), Look at the Pictures never quite breaks free from the lionizing of Mapplethorpe and appeasing people who already defend him.
April 05, 2016
Each chapter of Mapplethorpe's biography - his Catholic boyhood in Queens, his renowned romances with Patti Smith and the collector Sam Wagstaff, his devotion to and aestheticizing of s/m - is given the same cursory treatment.
January 02, 2017
Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato's authoritative doc about the artist positively commands us to appreciate it, from flower studies to the fetish scenes that shocked '80s America.
April 27, 2016
The film seeks to humanize an artist who'd been demonized, but not by ignoring his own demons.
January 13, 2017
What we learn from the enjoyable punditry of siblings, art-world associates and former lovers is that the gorgeous provocateur was consumed with fame, and that everything and everybody was a means to that end.
September 19, 2016
The focus of this documentary is the work and life - the former overwhelmed the latter - of iconoclastic American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
