Pistils, Photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe with an Essay by John Ashbery. Hardcover – 1st Edition, 1996
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 earned a reputation as the embodiment of a rigorous formalism that was strikingly combined with graphic and sometimes controversial subject matter.
Most of Robert Mapplethorpe’s days began in the early afternoon, often with photographing flowers. Mapplethorpe used them to help focus his vision. The flowers helped him make the transition to his more daring work, which he created late at night.
*Pistils* reproduces 120 of these ravishing images of flowers, many of which have never been published. The full range of Mapplethorpe’s virtuosity is on display here—early Polaroids; meticulous 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.
Published by Random House, 1996, in very good condition (box set)
12.0 cm 13.4 cm, 173 pages, 2.7 kg
ISBN 0679408053
Pistils, Photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe with an Essay by John Ashbery. Hardcover – 1st Edition, 1996
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 earned a reputation as the embodiment of a rigorous formalism that was strikingly combined with graphic and sometimes controversial subject matter.
Most of Robert Mapplethorpe’s days began in the early afternoon, often with photographing flowers. Mapplethorpe used them to help focus his vision. The flowers helped him make the transition to his more daring work, which he created late at night.
*Pistils* reproduces 120 of these ravishing images of flowers, many of which have never been published. The full range of Mapplethorpe’s virtuosity is on display here—early Polaroids; meticulous 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.
Published by Random House, 1996, in very good condition (box set)
12.0 cm 13.4 cm, 173 pages, 2.7 kg
ISBN 0679408053
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