GOLDEN, ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE THIS IS NOT YOUR HISTORY, 2016
“Robert Mapplethorpe This Is Not Your History was created as a direct retaliation to the Portfolio Z series shot and captured by Robert Mapplethorpe in the late ’70s. In photo history, Mapplethorpe’s works are often sourced and attributed as visual etymologies for queer representations—losing sight of how the gaze of whiteness makes a spectacle of blackness when it’s being is rendered as just ‘body.’ In my photograph, I use the oppositional gaze—one that looks back—as well as the unreadability of shadowing, removing that which Mapplethorpe most profoundly commodified to be the definition of blackness and maleness to disavow the anthropological racism constructed within his Portfolio Z series. I, the artist and the collaborator, take back what is seen, what can been seen, and what of my body is for consumption.” — Golden