Eccentrics' love, thought, hospitality* and other feelings. Robert Mapplethorpe's and Nan Goldin's affective(?) photographs

This article interprets the feelings in photographic art of Robert Mapplethorpe (1945-1989) and Nan Goldin (born 1953), usually analysed in terms of being 'extremely sexualised'. In Mapplethorpe's and Goldin's art, we can sense feelings. In our opinion, photography can love, think, and offer hospitability/'other(guest)ness'* to strangers, eccentrics, weirdoes of any genre. Afterthought on feelings has been there since Heraclitus and The Song of Songs; today, scholars like Hélene Cixous, André Green, Julia Kristeva, Martha C. Nussbaum or Griselda Pollock have resumed the discussion. Mapplethorpe's and Goldin's art appears to be intimate, bi-sexual, one that explores homosexuality, as we believe, as an emotional orientation. We interpret these pieces of photographic art as being composed of love, dissimilar/eccentric thought, and interiors - body-souls. (* The Polish word for 'hospitality' used in the original is split into two, enabling a pun: gosc-innosc, i.e. 'guest + otherness' = hospitality. -Translator's note)