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 ...

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 ...

“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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

Indeed, as Philip Gefter argues in this excellent and overdue biography, without Wagstaff ... approves of photography-as-art,” adding: “Sam Wagstaff is the artist that one most remembers ...