Week 01 Photo Challenge: Self Portrait

I chose the famous photographer Robert Mapplethorpe as my artist of choice, to share a self-portrait with. He created this image, "Robert Mapplethorpe Self-Portrait 1988" just before he died of an AIDS related disease. 
 In 1986, he was diagnosed with AIDS. Despite his illness, he increased his creative efforts, broadened the scope of his photographic inquiry, and accepted increasingly challenging commissions. The Whitney Museum of American Art mounted his first major American museum retrospective in 1988, one year before his death in 1989.
 I respect Mapplethorpe’s perseverance and determination to continue to do his art and shoot what he wanted even though he was dying.  Don’t let a little thing like death hold you back from doing what you love. I also appreciate how he would shoot what he wanted and when he wanted to shot. Mapplethorpe would shoot stylized compositions of male and female nudes, delicate flower still lifes, and studio portraits of artists and celebrities just to name a few of the styles of photography that would interest him at any given time.
I shot my self-portrait in the studio using three strobe lights and approximately five flags to direct the light from the strobes to exact locations on my body with the help of an assistant.  I attempted to use depth of field to make it appear as if I was standing behind Mapplethorpe and slightly above, so as not to take away from the main importance of the subject, Mapplethorpe himself. I purposefully allowed more shadows on my face to help show I was behind the subject in the photo. I also wore all black and used a cobra headed cane instead of a skull headed cane in the shot.