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Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe – mentor and parasite?

This documentary is really much more about the rich curator and collector Sam Wagstaff than about the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, whose tediously mediocre output is testimony to the power of marketing over quality. Repeat the lie often enough and people desperately searching for an opinion to fill the void of their own will beat a path to your door.

Mediocre and tedious as Mapplethorpe’s work may be, it does not detract from Wagstaff’s vision. The latter is best known for amassing a vast collection of vintage photographic images dating back to the very start of photography, a collection which he eventually sold to the Getty Museum, a great sponsor of photography. Not that he needed the money as the Wagstaffs were New York monied elite, but the Getty obviously agreed with his discriminating eye.

Quite why a man with film star looks surrounded by gorgeous fawning women would take the path he did I will leave you to figure out, for I will never understand it, but suffice it to say that his lifestyle choices resulted in a premature death at age 66, almost certainly the result of his protegé’s proclivities which saw them both dead within 2 years of one another.

No matter. Wagstaff made photography collectible and we should all be grateful for that. The documentary is fun to watch and heaps well deserved praise on a visionary photography collector and curator.