When looking at art, one can try and identify whether there is a message to understand or something to decipher within the piece, that we would not think would be included. With Robert Mapplethorpe, his photos focused on the people of the world and what they were feeling. Numerous pieces of his work have been considered controversial and graphic to say the very least. But, his works do focus on the roles of gender in society. His work focuses on facial features and body features such as size, shape, and expression. He tends to focus on the beauty of the human body and looks at the body as being a canvas. Many of his works are of nude people because he wants the viewer to understand the beauty of the person, bare to the bone. But, this way of art is also a way of convening to the viewer who is a male and who is a female. He looks at the difference in body parts as being a way to identify between gender. You can have a woman with short hair dressed in a leather jacket and jeans and assume having never known her that she could be a man. With Mapplethorpe, at least in my opinion, there could be none of this. He wants to the world to accept the people that live on this Earth (Awkward phrasing, but you get it). Mapplethorpe also take this technique as being a way of people to identify who they are. Some people in his photographs have tattoos, which could symbolize the stories of their past and could tell a story about the person who has the tattoos. He lets the people tell the story based on how they look and he lets the spectator try and decipher who the person is and what the story is that they are trying to tell.