One assumes this is Philip Gefter's way of introducing Sam Wagstaff, a lesser-known personality ... A more important matter is the assertion on which this biography is based: that photography ...

Gefter is the author of Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe (WW. Norton, 2014). It's the first major biography of Sam Wagstaff, a name as obscure as Mapplethorpe's is infamous. Sam was ...

“Sam Wagstaff was considered a great photography collector,” Holly Solomon observes in Patricia Morrisroe’s 1975 biography Mapplethorpe. “I wouldn’t have touched Robert without Sam.

In his excellent biography of art curator and collector Sam Wagstaff, Philip Gefter notes how the rise of the gay rights movement in the early 1970s occurred at the same time as the growing ...

Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest -- delivered directly to your inbox. “He had desire, stamina, intensity — all the things that make passion work,” said the photography dealer ...

James Crump's documentary Black White + Gray: A Portrait Of Sam Wagstaff And Robert Mapplethorpe ... other artists and historians. As a biography of one of the key figures of 20th-century American ...

Today would have been Robert Mapplethorpe’s 68th birthday. Like all revered cultural figures that are no longer with us, there seems to be a frantic and constant search to find out more about ...

Sam Wagstaff knew there was something special ... The two men became lovers on the day they met, and, according to this terrific biography, the history of photography was changed forever.

Given Wagstaff’s relative obscurity and the close relationship between the two men, writer-director James Crump may have felt pressured to frame this as a twin portrait. Yet the flashy ...