It has the air of a piece of evidence brought back to prove that such

It has the air of a piece of evidence brought back to prove that such worlds of ingenious strangeness do truly exist. But such photographs, although they are what he is known for, are relatively rare in Mapplethorpe’s portfolio. Given his reputation, the majority of Mapplethorpe’s pictures now seem almost shockingly devoid of sexual intensity.Men squat on plinths, human exhibits morosely collaborating in their own aestheticisation Elsewhere, they are anatomised. A flexed muscle, a shaven head, a smooth, copper-coloured back – elements of the body are dwelt upon, by the photographer, with a cool, dandy’s relish. Mapplethorpe sought out men who looked like sculptures and then photographed them as someone might photograph works of art, aiming to bring out the fineness of the detail. Had he lived a different life, the nearly religious qualities of his approach might have been noted more often. Mapplethorpe marvels at the beauty of which the human form is capable, much as earlier, more transcendentally minded American artists had wondered at the paradisial beauty of nature.Mapplethorpe’s pictures of the male nude do not often seem touched by desire Nor do they seem intended to inspire it in others.

Despite the occasional act of calculated outrageousness – the most notorious example of which is the self-portrait in which he photographed himself with a bullwhip inserted, handle first, into his own anus – his imagination had a naturally abstract, almost Platonic cast to it. The people he photographed were archetypes of what he perceived to be either perfection or perfect strangeness. Lit to the point where they are almost overlit, faces in Mapplethorpe’s photographs become disembodied, abstracts of physiognomy like the faces of angels. Ken and Robert, a hairless white man and a hairless black man, seen bust-length, in profile, are photographic negatives of one another but twins in their weirdness.

Doris Saatchi is yet stranger, a spotlit creature from an apparition, a metallic phantom, with her platinum hair, her melancholy and her air of withdrawn malignity.The way in which Mapplethorpe’s pictures have been displayed at the Hayward leaves much to be desired. The works have been crowded on to the walls and often double-hung. Each one has, by this strategy, been reduced to an element in a curator’s collage. This makes the photographs read as information rather than images, and thus denatures Mapplethorpe by making him look like some archivist of the gay scene – a documentary photographer in the same slight mould as that recorder of the Californian homosexual community, Nan Goldin. The crowding together of his works also fatally obscures Mapplethorpe’s chief talent as a photographer, an essentially classical ability to create memorable single images, with something of the quality of icons.Mapplethorpe brought the same cool and decadent chic to all that he photographed. He was not, as is sometimes claimed, one of the very greatest photographers But he was an extremely good one. He managed to force his obsessions into an imagery that was, inimitably, his, with the result that he (just as surely as, say, Diane Arbus) created his own homogeneous photographic universe.

There is a self-possessed, elegant, prickly quality about all his best photographs. They are not necessarily all photographs of sex, although sexuality is usually implied in some form, whether Mapplethorpe is photographing the pistils of flowers, or a pair of testicular cacti poised atop a great penile vase, or red-eyed Donald Sutherland, looming out at you from the wall like a threat. But, whatever the subject, Mapplethorpe’s photographs are all pictures of difference, of a proud and independent weirdness. It is as if, by taking pictures, he hoped to create an alternative world, a place of higher oddity, among whose creatures he himself might live at peace.His most intriguing and original pictures are his pictures of men’s penises, of which, as might be expected, there are many. The penis, as photographed by Mapplethorpe, is like some curious plant that grows unaccountably and extraordinarily out of men’s bodies. Paradoxically, his predatory, erectile flowers have more of the expected qualities of penises, while his penises are so exotically weird they seem inhuman, like some parasite species that has managed to graft itself on to the human form.