9780679408055

Your Satisfaction is Guaranteed:

• 30 Day Return Policy
• Bookseller Guarantee
• Privacy & Security Policy

Robert Mapplethorpe began taking photographs in the 1970s with a Polaroid camera given to him by a friend. When he died in 1989 of AIDS, at the age of forty-two, he was considered one of the most important photographers of his generation, having gained a reputation as the avatar of a rigorous formalism stunningly wed to graphic and sometimes controversial subject matter.Most of Robert Mapplethorpes days began in the early afternoon, often by photographing flowers. Mapplethorpe used them to help focus his vision, centering and warming up for his commercial portrait work. The flowers also helped him to effect the transition to the more daring work, which he executed late at night.Pistils reproduces 120 of these ravishing images of flowers, many of which have never been published. The full range of Mapplethorpes virtuosity is displayed here--early Polaroids: exacting still lifes in black-and-white and color; and extremely rare, toned gravure prints. Not since Georgia O'Keeffe has an artist looked at flowers with as developed an eye as Robert Mapplethorpe. In them he discovered sex, death, redemption, and, always, beauty. These photographs go far beyond decorative allure to place him firmly in the pantheon of the photographic masters.

"The best of the flower photos are as confrontational as the nudes, not because of their obvious phallic and vaginal echoes, but because they're so utterly alien and creaturely in their weird, sexy beauty. There's something nasty, something dark about these pictures that burns through their expensive gloss and undercuts the preciousness."

Vince Aletti, Voice Literary Supplement, Winter 1996

Pistils: Search Results