Flowers

Review by Ann Copeland: "Patti Smith's foreword, "A Final Flower," is a poetic tribute to the late photographer whose recent retrospective exhibition sparked a national legal debate over censorship in the arts. Smith's observation that Mapplethorpe embraced "the flower as the embodiment of all the contradictions reveling within," and in these photographs "found it was as easy to hurl beauty as anything else," enlarges this work in a meaningful way. The 50 color photographs of flowers taken over the past decade "by one who caused a modern shudder" are surprisingly conventional yet uniquely striking in their composition and lighting; Smith attributes their power to Mapplethorpe's "unflinching perception of the color, form and personality of the flower." The book's simple and sublime presentation--each opening a full-page plate facing a blank--serves to remind us that Mapplethorpe was a masterful photographer, not just an iconoclast."