After “I Sing the Body Electric,” by Walt Whitman, specically sections 7 and 8 ("A man’s body at auction / A woman's body at auction"), here shown studying “Ajitto” by Robert Mapplethorpe at the Guggenheim.

Both works, by white artists, charged white audiences with commodifying black bodies.  Both artists are long since dead, and many of their works became “bodies at auction.”

The peice cut off on the left is one of Mapplethorpe's self portraits.  The peice cut off to the right is one of his photos of Ada, a black female model shot in a classical style not unlike Ajitto.

For Pixel Dailies Topic "Poem"