Review: Black White + Gray: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe

Black White + Gray draws out the unseen riches that exist within what may otherwise appear typical or commonplace. Such subtle complexities are all too fitting for a film whose gaze rests upon the great art curator Sam Wagstaff—an individualistic and revolutionary purveyor of photography and long-time repressed homosexual—and his lover/partner Robert Mapplethorpe, a man 25 years his junior and from almost as opposite a background as was possible. Wagstaff’s artistic ambitions saw him rebelling against the high society into which he was born, while Mapplethorpe’s blue-collar experiences provided an antithetical quality that created an unlikely symbiosis between the two. At its core, the film is an exploration of the complications that arise amid two different elements (whether between two seemingly unrelated works of art or between Wagstaff and Mapplethorpe themselves), and through a finely, sensually assembled montage of images, interviews, and generally unobtrusive narration, it is one evoked with a crystalline clarity. Although its relatively schematic construction sometimes works against its best intentions, Black White + Gray uses these documents not as historical facts but as organic representations of life and lives past, aiming less to assemble some larger puzzle than to simply navigate the terrain at hand. Like Charles Foster Kane’s Rosebud, the film understands that the leftovers of these lives aren’t so much answers as they are invitations for additional exploration. While Wagstaff’s oppressed passions and lifestyle choices manifested themselves in his use of photography as a means of personal self-discovery, Mapplethorpe’s artistic confrontations of the sexual undercurrents in society were similarly confronted by bouts of dismissal and anger; together, the two probed into deeper arenas of discovery than the art world generally knew how to handle at the time. By evoking their relationship within the necessary contexts of both the AIDS outbreak (which ultimately killed them both in the late ’80s) and the spawning of the NYC punk rock scene (Patti Smith, a friend of both men, is consistently illuminating here), Black White + Grey extends its ode to art-as-life into the relevance of the here and now.