Jacques-Henri Lartigue.  "My Hydroglider with Propeller."  1904

After seeing the documentary on Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe [ http://www.blackwhitegray.com ]
I dropped Jim off at his place, came home and started prowling through images on the web.  What the film quotes Walter Benjamin saying (writing) about collecting, how it becomes a way not only of possessing but of becoming, or entering into the images, the stories represented by the images... I get that, and I think it applies to Sam's story and to everyone.  And that my interest in memoir is motivated in the same fashion. 

Is that silly?  Okay, how about pretentious?  I know.  But there's a part of me that strangely identifies with this boy in his tub, and there's a part of me that identifies with the Goncourt brothers at their parties with Flaubert and Zola... and it's not that I "wish" I'd been there, but more that I experience a sense of somehow having been there, a effortless deja vu, almost as though I've appropriated the memory without realizing it.  Plus there's the cumulative effect (of the accumulation of collecting) and the layering of associations, so the process is richer and more subtle and cross-time/culture/place. 

For instance, look at Bechdel's memoir, Fun Home: she uses literary models either introduced in the action or by her father's instruction (he was an English teacher).  There's a point where her mother is performing in an Oscar Wilde play and the overlapping of significance with the action in the real world is ... breathtaking.  That's appropriation and identification on a very high level, if you ask me.  And different from what I'm referring to, but related.  Hey, it's early still.

But see the comments to yesterday.  JRH is more an authority than I, especially in photography, that's for sure. 

As for the relationship of Robert and Sam, I thought the film (wisely) avoided making a definitive call, though "sugar daddy" was mentioned in passing as a way of describing Sam from Robert's pov.  Patti Smith had another way of seeing it.  In some respects it's a wonder she's still alive.

Jim and I were in line with a young man named Leonard, and we were reminiscing (for his benefit, he was very very cute) as a way of explaining why we were seeing the film.  Jim said he'd met and made out with Robert at the Cock Ring, back in the 70s.  I said I remembered Sam much later, when he'd sold the photography collection and was buying American silver.  Kim joined us, and said she just wanted to see Patti Smith.

Afterward, I think for me, seeing New York from those days was perhaps the best part, next to the images of the photos Sam collected.  At one point, there's footage of the views from Sam's penthouse at One Fifth  (both Jim and I used to drink at One Fifth -- the 'straight' bar/restaurant there -- before going out on the town -- or to "Studio" in Jim's version).  The camera tracks around this white room littered with piles of photographs, literally, and takes in the views of the City. 

At one point the Twin Towers come into view in the south, and the whole theater gasped.  Talk about the power of an image.