Mapplethorpe Flora

Mapplethorpe Flora: The Complete Flowers gathers the flower photographs Robert Mapplethorpe made from 1973 until his death in 1989, in a large hardback from Phaidon.

The book has 368 pages and measures 308 by 292 millimetres. Mark Holborn and Dimitri Levas edited and designed it. Levas, a friend of Mapplethorpe, contributes an essay, and the architecture critic Herbert Muschamp writes the introduction. Mapplethorpe took up the subject in a range of processes, from Polaroids to dye-transfer colour prints, and the flowers run from common species to rare ones. Phaidon lists more than one edition of the title.

Mapplethorpe (1946–1989) studied painting, drawing and sculpture in Brooklyn in the 1960s and began taking photographs in 1970, when he acquired a Polaroid camera. Holborn worked with the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation on its earlier volumes of the artist’s work, and Levas, an art director, worked closely with Mapplethorpe.