Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A collection of the acclaimed photographer's flower images features pieces from his final years.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

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.-- Ann Copeland, Champaign, Ill. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

The only sex organs on display in the latest volume of Mapplethorpe's photographs are of a botanical nature--though Jesse Helms might find the calla lilies just a bit too impudently phallic for his conservative taste. And with no nude toddlers, no whip-wielding sadists, and no black genitals, this volume will avoid the controversy that has resulted in the obscenity trial in a Cincinnati court that delivered a "not guilty" verdict. Even though the more notorious Mapplethorpe specialties are absent, these photos magnificently capture the artist's style and technique at its most formal. Particularly as a document of Mapplethorpe's late-period color work from 1987 through 1989, these photographs further confirm an artistic vision that could confront and reveal the eroticism of a single flower or the organic geometry of human figures with equal passion. Singer Patti Smith's brief introduction muses on Mapplethorpe the friend and artist. List of plates. ~--John Brosnahan