The Robert Mapplethorpe photo you haven't seen: The one he took of me

The Robert Mapplethorpe photo you haven't seen: The one he took of me describes a personal recollection of Robert Mapplethorpe’s impact on the author’s life and career. The narrator says they first met Mapplethorpe in the elevator of the Chelsea Hotel in 1973, when the narrator was 4, after their father died in a car accident and their mother was disoriented. They later lived as neighbors on opposite ends of Bond Street in summer 1976, with Mapplethorpe frequently appearing on his fire escape while the narrator returned from photo shoots. The piece situates Mapplethorpe, his longtime partner and patron Sam Wagstaff, and the narrator’s artistic family and punk band life within New York’s experimental scene. It provides intimate, time-stamped context, starting in childhood and extending through roughly a decade of daily contact, while foreshadowing further moments to be recounted.