Mapplethorpe Assault with a Deadly Camera
A Pop Culture Memoir
An Outlaw Reminiscence
by Jack Fritscher
The first and best book on Robert Mapplethorpe.
Mapplethorpe: Assault includes Jack Fritscher as interviewer of the following:
Edward Lucie-Smith, George Dureau, Joel-Peter Witkin, Holly Solomon, Camille O’Grady, Robert Opel, Miles Everett, Mark Walker, and Rex.
Additional persons interviewed about Robert Mapplethorpe by Jack Fritscher:
Crawford Barton, Edward Brooks DeCelle, Greg Day, Robert Pruzan, John [J.D. Slater] Duffy, Elsa Rady, and Wally Wallace.
Just as F. Scott Fitzgerald immortalized the Roaring ’20s, Jack Fritscher captures the essence of the tumultuous ’70s. Against a backdrop of riotous pop culture and gay life in America, this uncensored memoir offers a candid view of Robert Mapplethorpe who died of AIDS at age 42.
This book is based on the author’s detailed journals and Jack Fritscher creates a fresh, fast-paced account that hooks the reader like a page turning novel.
It started when the undiscovered Mapplethorpe flew to San Francisco in 1977 to ask Fritscher, then editor of Drummer magazine, to look at his portfolio. Fritscher, recognizing Mapplethorpe’s talent, assigned and supervised his first cover. They later became friends, colleagues, and lovers.
Mapplethorpe repeatedly asked Fritscher to write about him. Fritscher responded with features and fiction depicting the photographer. When Fritscher wrote the novel Some Dance to Remember, he dedicated it to Mapplethorpe, who read it in progress. The book was published to wide acclaim after Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989. The New Republic named the book a classic on a peer with Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, and Andrew Halloran’s Dancer from the Dance.
Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera is a vivid, compelling story of a specific group at a specific time in a specific place, living in a Golden Age before AIDS and its lost civilization sank beneath a viral sea.
This pop culture memoir contains sex, lies, greed,
perversion, murder, deceit, infidelity,
drugs, sex, immorality, scatology, ambition,
equivocation, character assassination, slander, blasphemy,
aspersion, betrayal, distortion, racism,
ungodliness, sodomy–
and that’s just the critics
of Mapplethorpe.
READ MAPPLETHORPE: ASSAULT WITH A DEADLY CAMERA
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Reviews
REVIEWS
“Jack Fritscher’s memoir is a marvelous recreation of an epoch, an art, and a man. Mapplethorpe was a…romantic figure who did more to liberate popular taste than any other artist….Fritscher is the perfect interpreter of Mapplethorpe, and his beautifully written book helps us understand how an apolitical photographer became so politically potent a culture symbol.”
–Charles Winnic, Ph.D., Professor of Sociology, City University of N.Y. and author of The People“An ex-lover of Mapplethorpe, Fritscher has news about the photographer who posthumously became the touchstone of the late 1980’s cultural wars. It isn’t pretty — but it is fresh, useful context for an old controversy.”
—Boston Globe, November 1994
Full Text Reviews
Print Media interviews of Jack Fritscher regarding Mapplethorpe
Media appearances (Television, Radio, and Personal) of Jack Fritscher regarding Mapplethorpe
- CNN SHOWBIZ TODAY
- THE BOOKCASE
- SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA BOOK FESTIVAL – November 1994
Articles on Robert Mapplethorpe with Jack Fritscher Referenced
- “Am-Mapplethorpe, What a Metaphor” (pdf)
- “Robert Mapplethorpe-Look at the Pictures” (pdf)
- “Mapplethorpe Beyond the Veil of the Sublime” (pdf)
- “Mapplethorpe: Look At The Pictures”-Sundance (pdf)
- “Robert Mapplethorpe made Patti Smith’s…” (pdf)
- “The Good and Evil in Mapplethorpe’s Flowers” (pdf)
- “MetalBondNYC.com” (pdf)
- ‘Dominick and Elliot’, Mapplethorpe, 1979-Tate (pdf)
- “Mapplethorpe’s Muse” (pdf)
- “Short Fictions Inspired by Mapplethorpe” (pdf)
Cover Photograph of Robert Mapplethorpe by George Dureau, New Orleans, 1978. HASTINGS HOUSE Book Publisher 50 Washington Street Norwalk, CT 06854 http:\\upub.com EMail info@upub.com Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 94-075258 ISBN 0-8038-9362-0 Spanish Edition El Fotografo del Escandalo Copyright 1995, Ediciones Martinez Roca, S.A. Enric Granados, 84, 08008 Barcelona ISBN 84-270-2027-9 Deposito legal B. 18.950-1995