Oxford came fairly early to a knowledge of the remarkable photography of Robert Mapplethorpe. His pictures were seen at the Museum of Modern Art (now Modern Art Oxford) in 1984, the first year he exhibited in Britain. Last autumn the same venue hosted Polaroids: Mapplethorpe, showing 92 of the estimated 1,500 images he shot on what was then a comparatively new type of camera while he was living with his girlfriend, the later-to-be-rock-star Patti Smith, at New York’s legendary Chelsea Hotel.

The 1984 show featured a number of graphic male nudes and some studies of men fully clothed but with their genitalia exposed. Lord Snowdon and the Bishop of Southwark were also seen on the gallery walls. Their clothes were on and buttoned.

A memorable feature of the show for me remains the sight of people trying not to look shocked by images, some of them sado-masochistic, that could previously have been seen only in under-the-counter porn mags. One critic commented that a practice depicted would have seemed to him, without the evidence of the photograph, to have been physically impossible.

Cannily, the artist recognised the role of the viewer as an important aspect of his work. Next to one of the more extreme images he placed a mirror, so our reactions could be studied in conjunction with it.

In complete contrast, the show featured pictures, in calm pastel colours, of flowers. The Oxford Times’s critic judged these the work of a true artist, their sculptural style (and that of his figures) reflecting his involvement in that art form.

How serious and devoted a servant of art Mapplethorpe was is made clear in Just Kids (Bloomsbury, £18.99), a new book about his life written by Patti Smith in fulfilment of a promise she made shortly before his death from Aids in 1989, aged 42.

It is a superbly written book, as good in its way as Bob Dylan’s Chronicles in which another iconic figure of the rock world showed a remarkable (though in his case hardly surprising) facility with words.

The story it tells is in some ways a sad one, beginning as a love story and ending as an elegy (as the blurb puts it).

A strong poetic sensibility informs the writing. Here, for example, is a line or two concerning his gift to her of a book on the tarot: “Inside it he had inscribed a few lines of poetry, portraying us as the gypsy and the fool, one creating silence; one listening closely to the silence. In the clanging swirl of our lives, these roles would reverse many times.”

His switch from sexual interest in women to men is subtly presented. “I came home and there were cutouts or statues, the torsos and buttocks of Greeks, the Slaves of Michelangelo, images of sailors, tattoes and stars. To keep up with him, I read Robert passages from Miracle of the Rose, but he was always a step ahead. While I was reading Genet, it was as if he was becoming Genet.”

But no space for more quotations. Buy the book, then hear the author talk about it on Monday, March 22, at the Oxford Literary Festival. (www.oxfordliteraryfestival.com Box office tel: 0870 343 1001.)