Onder Zeeniveau

One picture is worth a thousand words, but some are worth many thousand and sometimes thousands of dollars. This story is of such a picture, a photograph by the artist Robert Mapplethorpe. When you look, you will see me, the model. What you cannot see is the story behind the image, its provenance.

On the night I met Robert Mapplethorpe he presented a slide show of black male nudes in a men’s center located in the basement of a West Village Church. It seems incongruous in light of how renowned an artist he has become to think of him in such lowly surroundings. Next week, I will travel to Los Angeles to celebrate at both the Getty Museum and the L.A. County Museum of Art, major exhibitions of Robert Mapplethorpe’s work.

I was about to become a porn star, but in 1982 that had not yet happened. I had just…