Eccentrics’ love, thought, hospitality and other feelings. Robert Mapplethorpe’s and Nan Goldin’s affective(?) photographs Cover Image

Miłość odmieńców, myśl, gość-inność i inne uczucia. Afektywność fotografii Roberta Mapplethorpe'a i Nan Goldin?
Eccentrics’ love, thought, hospitality and other feelings. Robert Mapplethorpe’s and Nan Goldin’s affective(?) photographs

Author(s): Paweł Leszkowicz, Tomasz Kitliński
Subject(s): Photography
Published by: Instytut Badań Literackich Polskiej Akademii Nauk
Keywords: Robert Mapplethorpe; Nan Goldin; photography; hospitability

Summary/Abstract: This article interprets the feelings in photographic art of Robert Mapplethorpe (1945–1989) and Nan Goldin (born 1953), usually analysed in terms of being ‘extremely sexualised’. In Mapplethorpe’s and Goldin’s art, we can sense feelings. In our opinion, photography can love, think, and offer hospitability/‘other(guest)ness’* to strangers, eccentrics, weirdoes of any genre. Afterthought on feelings has been there since Heraclitus and The Song of Songs; today, scholars like Hélène Cixous, André Green, Julia Kristeva, Martha C. Nussbaum or Griselda Pollock have resumed the discussion. Mapplethorpe’s and Goldin’s art appears to be intimate, bi-sexual, one that explores homosexuality, as we believe, as an emotional orientation. We interpret these pieces of photographic art as being composed of love, dissimilar/eccentric thought, and interiors – body-souls.

  • Issue Year: 2007
  • Issue No: 1-2
  • Page Range: 272-284
  • Page Count: 13
  • Language: Polish