Robert Mapplethorpe didn't have much money, and he was spending it on gay porn. But because the magazines were wrapped, he couldn't see what was inside before he bought them. Often, he'd get them home only to find there was nothing good in there.

When he complained about this to a friend of Patti Smith's (who he was living with at the time at the Chelsea Hotel), she suggested he make his own porn. She had a Polaroid camera, it was instant, he could look at what he was making while he was making it; why didn't he use it?

And that's how Robert Mapplethorpe became a photographer.

Sylvia Wolf tells the story about her discovery of Mapplethorpe's Polaroids in a podcast I recorded with her last week—and along with the exhibition at the Henry, there's also a book I want to mention.

The book has its own external wrapper, in a nod to what Wolf describes as the "agonizingly pleasurable experience" of "inviting suspense and withholding gratification"—something central to Mapplethorpe's art.

The book has a few great attributes. First, the plates in it are basically the same size as the actual Polaroids, because the Polaroids are so small (4 by 5 at the largest). So you can spend hours studying them at more or less the correct scale, which is a beautiful thing (there is so much loss in typical art books!).

But in addition to that, the book also has many images that are not in the exhibition. Some of these are owned by the Guggenheim and couldn't travel to Seattle, but others are absent from the exhibition for a more interesting reason: only the negatives still exist. (Early on, making Polaroids included separating the print from the negative and coating it with a fixing solution.)

There is a whole languorous-Muybridge-like sequence of self-portraits in which Mapplethorpe approaches a hanging robe, puts it on, takes it off, and faces the camera nude—wraps and unwraps himself—that can only be found in the book. The prints are lost. Wolf tried to find them, but, failing that, the Mapplethorpe Foundation agreed to allow plates to be made for the book from the negatives. I wish I could show them to you here. You just have to get the book, unwrap it, and look.