Fenton Bailey & Randy Barbato On How To Find The Best Fisting Pictures

"Here's a really useful exercise: look up fisting pictures on the internet, and look at as many as you can," says Fenton Bailey. "Once you look at all these other fisting pictures, you realise how great his pictures are. You'll definitely see the difference between a regular fisting picture and a Mapplethorpe fisting picture. You really do!"

Bailey, 56, and his partner Randy Barbato have found wild success as the producers behind the RuPaul's Drag Race reality-TV empire, but the pair are documentarians at heart. Having made films like Inside Deep Throat, Party Monster, and The Eyes Of Tammy Faye, their latest is Mapplethorpe: Look At The Pictures, an exploration of the life and work of infamous New York photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. His X Portfolio pictures — of leatherware, pissing and various things inserted in various orifices — found infamy in 1989. Mere months after his death, they showed as part of his The Perfect Moment retrospective, which lead to Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center being put on trial for obscenity.

"Rather than just looking at it through the lens of scandal and outrage, of filth and pornography; all this extraneous stuff that has nothing to do with the work."

"It's taken a full generation — 25 years — for us to be able to forget the scandal and to actually just look at his work for what it is," Bailey observes. "Rather than just looking at it through the lens of scandal and outrage, of filth and pornography; all this extraneous stuff that has nothing to do with the work."

Look At The Pictures is a portrait of the artist at work; Mapplethorpe's "tragically-short" life filled with work made at a maniacal, drug-aided pace. He was a hustler, with a savvy public-relations mind; a daily documentarian long before this pics-or-it-didn't-happen era. "He said that the life he was leading was a work of art, and the pictures were the documentation of that," says Bailey. "The interviews he gave were a part of his work. The things he kept were a part of his work. He had a sense of his own role as an artist, and therefore kept a lot of material that for a museum curator is absolutely essential in presenting an artist to the public. Everything in his life was about his art. He was someone who was very open, transparent. He didn't hide things, he wasn't ashamed, he didn't apologise, he didn't edit himself."

Mapplethorpe's love of documentation meant that Bailey and Barbato had a "cache of material" from which to draw; the subject of the film being on screen so much he essentially serves as the narrator. There's other talking heads, too, but not Mapplethorpe's most famous friend. "Patti Smith, we couldn't persuade to sit down for an interview," Bailey says. "In the end, she's in the [archival footage], but it's also important for people to understand that Mapplethorpe's story is his own story. She's a part of it, but only a part. Just Kids is a fantastic book, but I think people can come away from it thinking that the Mapplethorpe story is the Patti Smith story, when it's really not."