There are different sorts of documentaries. Some are about important topics — the people and events that changed our lives. Some are about things that are just interesting. Some are about little-known figures that may have an air of eat-your-vegetables importance, like the life of some guy you’ve never heard of who was one of the Georgia delegates who the last ones to sign the Declaration of Independence. You’re supposed to care, but… who cares, really?
But sometimes, the life of a guy you’ve never heard of can be very interesting. One example from Silverdocs was A Walk into the Sea (previously discussed here). Another was Black White + Gray: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe. Wagstaff was an art museum curator and a photography collector. In the early Seventies, he started a relationship with Mapplethorpe and he helped build the latter’s career. You get a glimpse of the whole decadent art world of New York in the Seventies and you get lots of interview footage of Mapplethorpe’s best friend Patti Smith. But you also get two other interesting things.
Wagstaff was born in 1922. He studied at Yale University, served in the Navy during World War II and was an advertising executive in the Fifties. He was a very handsome distinguished-looking man and was very popular with the ladies. But he was a closeted gay; he finally chucked it all and totally changed his life in the Sixties. He studied art and become a cutting-edge curator, championing the works of such artists as Andy Warhol, Tony Smith, Richard Tuttle, James Lee Byars, Agnes Martin, Michael Heizer, Ad Reinhardt, Frank Stella and Ray Johnson. Under Mapplethorpe’s influence, he fully embraced hedonism in his later years. Quite a arc for the life of a man.
Secondly, Wagstaff was a huge collector of photography. The film really explores the value of photography as an art form. What’s interesting is that what Wagstaff was collecting initially wasn’t art. A lot of them were what one person in the film calls “vernacular photography,” some of them by amateur photographers of ordinary subjects and some commercial in nature. But there was an aesthetic to much of it that caught Wagstaff’s eye. Black White + Gray certainly shows the development of photography from its origins in the mid 19th Century to the present.
Tags: Silverdocs, Black White + Gray, Sam Wagstaff, Robert Mapplethorpe. documentary, art, photography