Travel Tip: Art and Archaeology in Scotland
Robert Mapplethorpe

Some 75 photographs are on view in this retrospective.

Robert Mapplethorpe (1946 - 1989) became famous, not to say notorious, in the 1970s and 1980s for his photographs of male and female nudes and for his depictions of gay, sado-masochistic sex. His exploration of hitherto hidden areas of life was very much part of the sexual liberation movements of that time.

Mapplethorpe was a perfectionist, who cared for traditional values of tone and composition. He chose on the whole to photograph beautiful people, in a light which brought out their best features and emphasised balance and symmetry. Increasingly as the AIDS epidemic took its toll particularly on the gay community Mapplethorpe drew attention in his work to the links between beauty, eros and death, drawing on some of the traditional memento mori (‘remember you must die’) symbols of art history.