Always the same eyes: on Robert Mapplethorpe

Much of the critical writing about the visual impact of Robert Mapplethorpes photographs, particularly those that show the extreme S&M practices of gay men, discusses the division between style and content. Arthur Danto opens his essay Playing with the Edge, written for the first major posthumous book of Mapplethorpes photographs (1992), with this idea: There is a tension at the heart of Mapplethorpes art, verging on paradox, between its most distinctive content and its mode of presentation