Certain People: A Book of Portraits

Overview

Certain People: A Book of Portraits (1985) gathers Robert Mapplethorpe's incisive black-and-white photographs of notable figures from the worlds of art, fashion, music, and letters. Presented as a tightly edited sequence, the images place each sitter within the photographer's austere visual grammar: spare backgrounds, controlled studio lighting, and an almost sculptural attention to form. An introduction by Susan Sontag frames the collection, offering critical perspective on Mapplethorpe's method of looking and the aesthetic stakes of portraiture.
Rather than a catalog of fame, the book reads as a study of presence. Portraits range from posed, highly stylized images to moments that feel quietly revealing, and the arrangement emphasizes relationships among faces, gestures, and the photographic apparatus. The result is both a gallery of recognizable personalities and a coherent argument about how portraiture can balance admiration, critique, and aesthetic rigor.

Subjects and Portraiture

The sitters include cultural figures and celebrities whose identities function as both subject matter and social signifiers. Mapplethorpe often photographs people associated with the New York scene, artists, writers, musicians, models, and other public personalities, rendering them in a way that highlights individual character while also treating them as formal presences. Whether direct or slightly averted, each gaze is treated as an element of portrait composition, revealing the sitter's surface and the photographer's relationship to that surface.
Portraits emphasize gestures, costume, and physicality without resorting to journalistic narration. Faces and bodies are framed to isolate essential lines and contrasts, so that the sitter's notoriety becomes one ingredient among many. The images resist easy intimacy while often producing a strong sense of recognition; familiarity is countered by Mapplethorpe's tendency to stylize, to compress biography into carefully controlled visual statements.

Style and Technique

Black-and-white photography dominates, with high-contrast tones and pinpoint lighting sculpting features and textures. Mapplethorpe's training in formal composition shows in his use of negative space, crisp contours, and an economy of props. Backgrounds are frequently minimal, directing attention to posture, expression, and clothing as elements of design rather than mere documentary detail. The photographic surface, skin, fabric, hair, acquires a tactile presence that reads almost like relief sculpture.
The camera's neutrality is a deliberate illusion. Lighting choices and framing choreograph how viewers apprehend personality, making each portrait an act of construction. Mapplethorpe borrows from classical portraiture, fashion photography, and studio portrait traditions, synthesizing them into images that feel both timeless and of their moment. The technical precision supports a visual rhetoric in which clarity, symmetry, and contrast stand in for narrative explanation.

Themes and Cultural Context

The book sits at the intersection of celebrity culture and avant-garde art of the 1980s. Themes of identity, performance, and the politics of appearance recur: how public figures present themselves, how audiences read surface signs, and how photography mediates that exchange. The portraits explore the volatility of fame and the photographic encounter's potential to flatten or complicate personal history, often foregrounding the ambiguity between self-fashioning and candid revelation.
Susan Sontag's introductory commentary underscores the ethical and aesthetic questions that portraiture raises, addressing the tension between admiration and objectification. The book participates in broader conversations about visibility, representation, and taste, especially at a time when cultural boundaries were being renegotiated in art, fashion, and media.

Reception and Legacy

Certain People helped consolidate Mapplethorpe's reputation as a master of studio photography, admired for technical mastery and a distinctive visual voice. Critics praised the book's formal discipline and its ability to capture cultural figures with a clarity that was at once flattering and exacting. At the same time, Mapplethorpe's broader body of work continued to prompt debates about sexuality, censorship, and the limits of aesthetic provocation, conversations to which this portrait book contributed by demonstrating how well-crafted images can complicate simple readings of subject and intent.
Decades after its publication, Certain People endures as a reference point for photographers and art historians interested in portraiture's capacity to shape public perception. The elegant restraint of the images and the intellectual framing provided by Sontag ensure the book's place as a touchstone in discussions of photographic style, celebrity, and the ethics of looking.