The name Robert Mapplethorpe conjures up cool, slick, faultless photographs of the human body, rendered in marmoreal black and white. It also connotes the explicit but exquisitely composed X-rated pictures that excited intense political scrutiny in the early 1990s. What the name does not usually suggest is tenderness, imperfection, or spontaneity – which is why the Whitney’s small but packed little show of the photographer’s early Polaroids comes as such a welcome shock.

Many of these instant photos have never been shown, and the rest only rarely; together they reveal in Mapplethorpe a very different sensibility, one that had yet to form its mature, glistening carapace. Here, naked men lounge on rumpled sheets or pose on scarred wood floors, but they have not yet achieved the serenely masculine magnificence he would give them later on. They are friends, lovers and colleagues – people, in other words, rather than ravishing arrangements of long, lean limbs.