Was it because of the intrinsic quality of his photos, or did the time and place - New York in the 1970s - somehow require his sort of fame?Patricia Morrisroe's unreflective recent biography, Mapplethorpe, ignores such matters. I believe her to be too bland about the deadhead amoralism of the Mapplethorpe circle. She writes that he did no creative work at all unless high on "marijuana, amphetamines, Quaaludes, acid, MDA and amyl nitrite", and to his biographer this seems okay. She reports that he had a thing about Nazi regalia, without further comment except to mention that a Jewish shopkeeper was upset. Mapplethorpe liked to photograph men who were eating his faeces No reaction from Morrisroe. He did have some eminence as a photographer, and his camerawork raised questions about a subject we can't ignore - pornography in the public world. Personally, I'm curious about the way that this kid with no more than average talents became so successful.

Their tight-knit society of animals and grass, ritual and survival, will never be quite the same again !. When Robert Mapplethorpe turned his camera on friends and lovers, the results wererevealing in more ways thanthe photographer intended.Tim Hilton assesses an iconROBERT MAPPLETHORPE's life is interesting for a number of reasons, even if you haven't got a commitment to white-on-black sado-masochistic homosexuality. A savage conflict in a remote part of Europe has brought the Samburu to the brink of the modern world. The UN complied with its wishes and dismissed the Kenyan battalion in May.The circumcision ceremony has started, and Lolpirdai wanders over to photograph a group of warriors with his Instamatic.

I look at his US Army watch and his "No Fly Zone, Bosnia-Hercegovina" T-shirt and sense the undertow of change. None the less, the Croatian government this year demanded the withdrawal of all African soldiers, saying that it would be preferable to have European peacekeepers. The Croats became so devoted to their guardians that they even learnt a smattering of Swahili. "They'd come running up to me and stick the barrel of their gun up against my neck.

We were there to stop the fighting, not to kill people, so I'd say, 'Go on, shoot me.' Then I'd take the gun out of their hands."Some of the Kenyan troops were delegated to guard pockets of elderly Croats from the Serbs who surrounded their villages. Sometimes he would share his food (meat and yoghurt, a diet very similar to the one he enjoyed at home) with Serb fighters and talk through the night with them as they drank enormous quantities of vodka and wine which he, as a teetotaller, refused The next day, the same Serbs would threaten to kill him. Lem-pesi's are mental, the result of what he saw in the former Yugoslavia. He remembers his time with the UN on the Bosnia-Croatia border as one of lunatic brutality mingled with cam-araderie. Ledudej's are physical, wounds from a lion that left him with such bad septicaemia that he spent three months in hospital recovering. When the lion pinned him to the ground, he severed its jugular vein with his sword.