On January 6, 1973, Light Gallery in New York opened Robert Mapplethorpe's early Polaroid exhibition, documented by the surviving invitation image titled Self Portrait with Camera. Tate identifies Mapplethorpe's first solo exhibition as Polaroids at Light Gallery in 1973, while the Light Gallery history places the gallery among the first United States spaces to represent living photographers and to help make photography collectible as contemporary art. The date matters because Mapplethorpe was still moving from mixed-media collage into photography as an autonomous practice. The show preceded his later large-format portraits, body studies, and culture-war notoriety, but it marked the public emergence of the photographic language that would define his career.
The exhibition helped launch Mapplethorpe's photographic career within a gallery system newly receptive to contemporary photography.
