George Dureau – Photographer & Painter
George Dureau, painter and photographer based in New Orleans’s French Quarter, was a formative influence on Robert Mapplethorpe, who collected nearly forty of Dureau’s photographs and, according to Dureau, drew stylistic elements — particularly his treatment of Black male models and amputee subjects — from Dureau’s work. Jack Fritscher and Mark Hemry filmed and interviewed Dureau at his New Orleans studio in March 1991 for “Mapplethorpe Mentor: George Dureau,” a chapter in Fritscher’s memoir Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera; that video interview is also available on YouTube. Fritscher and Hemry’s two documentaries of Dureau, Dureau Vérité: Life, Camera, Canvas and Dureau in Studio, are held in the permanent collection of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris.
Dueling Photographers: George Dureau and Robert Mapplethorpe
Mapplethorpe Assault with a Deadly Camera
Take 17: Mapplethorpe Mentor: George Dureau
Video Interview with George Dureau (YouTube)
Video Interview of Jack Fritscher by A.M. Hanson (YouTube)
Jack Fritscher on his friends Robert Mapplethorpe and George Dureau, plus LGBT eyewitness history