Opens with actress Kathy Acker reading excerpts from A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud. Robert Mapplethorpe, his friends and associates, and art critics discuss his photography. His work is hung in many major museums despite the issues of sex, violence and race it raises. All agree with him: "I captured something at a certain time about a certain place, New York, and that can't be captured anymore ... Things have changed." The program includes many of his black and white photographs, particularly those of the gay male community in New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s
