Books by Jack Fritscher

WINNER! 2025 Independent Press Award – LGBT Non-Fiction

Dueling Photographers:
George Dureau and Robert Mapplethorpe

This essential art history by eyewitness-participant Fritscher examines one of 20-century art’s great questions of influence and mentorship — George Dureau to Robert Mapplethorpe— two icons colliding around race, primacy, and originality. In lively transcripts, beloved New Orleans painter-photographer-sculptor Dureau holds court on life, lensing black men, and mentoring Mapplethorpe. While ambitious student Robert eclipsed his teacher by inflecting George’s regional work for New York tastes, neither was a villain in the ten-year tutorial-duel that ended when both suddenly stopped shooting black men in 1988.

  This legacy book, authenticated by friends and family, is a mandate. Both photographers asked historian Fritscher whom they knew for years to tell their stories. So he first wrote about his 1970s bicoastal lover Robert in Drummer magazine in 1978, and began recording George immediately after Robert’s death in 1989.

  His immersive introduction curating the overshadowed Dureau leads Virgil-like through important chat sessions captured by phone, and video on Dureau’s French Quarter balcony, 1989-1991, revealing Dureau, demanding, generous, uproarious, pursuing art despite the odds surrounding homosexuality, race, and disability.

  This is George speaking for himself, fit and on top before the Millennium, Hurricane Katrina, and Alzheimer’s took their toll. Fritscher’s release of this archival material, part of his Mapplethorpe canon, is a great gift and an act of love for Dureau, Mapplethorpe, and their models. This illustrated fast-read is essential art research illuminating two Titans at the end of the 1980s, recalling the way they really were before their lives became legends that became myth.

READ DUELING PHOTOGRAPHERS FOR FREE with ILLUSTRATIONS
Entire book as PDF or FlipBook or ePub

“This book is essential art history giving a sense of time, place, and context while illuminating two Titans — one remembered, one nearly forgotten — at the end of the 1980s.

These lively historic transcripts of legendary New Orleans artist George Dureau in conversation with gay historian Jack Fritscher act as a lens through which we’re able to peer into one of 20th-century art’s great questions of influence and mentorship: George Dureau and Robert Mapplethorpe.

The author who knew both men for years leads us Virgil-like through these sessions recorded at long-distance on landlines — and up close on video cameras on Dureau’s French Quarter balcony from 1989 to 1991. George is fit and on top fifteen years before Hurricane Katrina and Alzheimer’s took their toll.

Fritscher’s release of this archival material is a great gift and an act of love for Dureau and Mapplethorpe and the models.”

— Jarret Lofstead, writer/filmmaker, George Dureau: New Orleans Artist

“In 2018, when my gallery hosted the first exhibit hanging Mapplethorpe and Dureau side by side, reviewer John d’Addario noted that going beyond mentorship, the joint pairing revealed both men were working ‘in the same vernacular’ creating ‘a kind of dialogue through their images.’ Having represented George since 1988, I couldn’t agree more with d’Addario that ‘the full story of Mapplethorpe and Dureau is still one that needs to be told.’ And here in Dueling Photographers that story begins.”

— Arthur Roger, Arthur Roger Gallery, New Orleans

“Dueling Photographers is a biographical history and indispensable archive giving George Dureau his due as a singular photographer of non-normativity. Suitably adjacent to queer and disability studies, this unique book takes on the important task of revealing this artist whose compassionate camera presents the beauty of the disabled human body in all its wondrous diversity.”

— Robert McRuer, PhD, author of Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability

“Dueling Photographers is my ‘black bible’ reminding me, chapter and verse, how my longtime friend George Dureau inspired me, a Puerto Rican New York photographer, about body, soul, and spirit in my own multiracial shoots and books. I deeply appreciate Fritscher’s candid and authentic portrait of George mentoring Mapplethorpe on the aesthetics, boundaries, and courtesies of interracial photography. Back in the day, I knew both George and Robert, so it’s lovely to hear George speaking for himself in the telephone calls and in-depth interviews that deliver great insight to his life and work which are both compelling and now historic.”

— Michael Alago, author, photographer, music executive, Polaroid Encounters 1998-2009

“Fritscher takes us deep into George Dureau’s world where George speaks for himself mentoring Robert Mapplethorpe about photography and race.

As close witness and part-enabler to Mapplethorpe’s trajectory, Fritscher who was friends with George and lovers with Mapplethorpe cross-stitches the two great artists to explicate both from his unique perspective.

For Dureau, who called himself Big Daddy, another southern Big Daddy appears in Tennessee Williams who is, at a slight distance, omnipresent in the French Quarter context whilst the other Big Daddy Sam Wagstaff in New York pours fuel on Mapplethorpe’s fire with notions of what parts of a Dureau picture work best for his boy Robert to slice off — distilling the concepts of form and deformity in the robustly humanistic portraits of George Dureau into his own stylised New York masks and mirrors.

Whilst one can’t ignore their dueling personalities, Fritscher takes pains to reassure the reader that neither Robert nor George was a villain. So I’ve discarded notions of which of the two rivals is better. I’m entranced by Fritscher’s eyewitness research in this richly detailed memoir of fresh scholarship documenting two artists and the eternal visions they left us.”

— A M Hanson, artist/photographer, London