Museum and Theatre Openings photo gallery

(Attended by Jack Fritscher)

Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures poster

HBO Productions
Directed by Fenton Bailey and Rand Barbato
Documentary: 2016, 1hr 48min

In March 2016, three cities opened their doors to Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures, and Jack Fritscher was there for all of it. Within a single week, HBO’s documentary — directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato — anchored a coast-to-coast conversation about Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography, beginning with the J. Paul Getty Museum’s opening on March 14, continuing at LACMA’s opening on March 16, and closing with the film’s San Francisco premiere at the Castro Theatre on March 20. The Getty and LACMA openings were no ordinary museum outings: together the two institutions staged Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium, a landmark joint retrospective — drawn from their historic 2011 joint acquisition of Mapplethorpe’s archive — that split more than 300 works across both venues, a rare instance of the two Los Angeles museums mounting a single exhibition as one. These photographs document Fritscher’s attendance at each event — the museum walk-throughs, the red-carpet moments, the packed theater — a firsthand record of how Mapplethorpe’s legacy was received by the institutions and audiences confronting it directly.