CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/11/2026

A long lost archive documenting life at the Chelsea Hotel, 1969–71

“Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith were close friends of mine from 1967 to 1972,” photographer Albert Scopin writes in this new book of recently rediscovered photographs. Taken while Scopin was living at NYC’s infamous Chelsea Hotel, collectively the pictures capture a distant, uninhibited bohemia populated by artists, Superstars, drag queens and runaways. “Everyone could have a stab at their own idea of a ‘free life,’” he writes. Here, Mapplethorpe is pictured in his studio on the ground floor of the Chelsea annexe. “The first time I visited him there in 1970 he was working on erotic collages that were fantastically bold. The next year he started experimenting with Polaroid material. Later he said of that experimental phase: ‘I began to understand that photography can be art.’”