Mapplethorpe Flora: The Complete Flowers

The flower may be the most photographed object on the planet, which is precisely what makes it close to unphotographable. Every phone that ever existed has been aimed at a tulip. The subject is so soaked in sentiment, so pre-approved as pretty, that a serious photographer usually walks straight past it. Robert Mapplethorpe walked toward it, and kept walking for the better part of two decades, and this Phaidon collection gathers the whole of that pursuit in one place.

What did he keep finding in a calla lily that a florist's wall calendar never will? Line, mostly. Weight, balance, the way a single stem can hold the compositional authority of a spine. The flowers arrive lit and posed with the same cool apparatus he brought to the human body in the comprehensive survey that sits beside this volume on the same shelf, and a blossom photographed that way stops being decoration. It becomes a figure.

The lineage is worth getting right. Mapplethorpe came up in the downtown New York of the 1970s, better known for portraits of that world and for the explicit pictures that would later put a museum director in a courtroom, and the flowers were often filed as his respectable sideline. That framing has it backward. The flowers are where the formal program runs cleanest, uncontaminated by shock or celebrity, a laboratory for the same obsessions worked out in safer material. He shot many of them in the same studio, under the same lights, on the same days he was photographing the human figure, and the crossover is unmistakable.

A calla curls out of blackness like a punctuation mark drawn in cream. An orchid is turned until it reads as a face, or a mask. Tulips lean past the vertical, heavy-headed, caught at the exact moment before the fall. The backgrounds go dead black or paper white so that nothing competes with contour, and grays do the labor that color usually shoulders, with a precision that feels close to architectural. Even the thorns get their due, a rose stem rendered as a row of small blades.

Because this is the complete flowers, the same subject returns across years, reworked, re-lit, re-seen. The calla of 1984 is not the calla of 1988. Watching a photographer circle one motif for two decades is its own kind of schooling, a record of an eye getting harder, cleaner, surer of what to leave out. The later dye-transfer color pieces show a different appetite, richer and more frankly sensual, the petals given the sheen of skin.

There is an older tradition standing behind all this, the Dutch flower painters who crowded a single vase with blooms that could never share a season, each perfect specimen already tipping toward rot. Mapplethorpe knew that history and pared it down to one stem at a time. His flowers carry the same undertone, beauty photographed at the exact moment it starts to be about mortality, which is the note his other subjects sound too.

Phaidon has printed the black-and-white plates in a deep tritone that holds the shadow detail these compositions live or die by, and the pacing hands most images a full page of their own. The sequencing avoids the trap of grouping by species, letting a stark 1980s lily fall against a lush later orchid so that the shifts in his thinking surface as you turn the pages.

Three hundred flowers is a lot of flowers. Read straight through, the formality can start to feel airless, and a viewer who wants the charge of his portraits or his more notorious work may find these studies cool to the touch. The restraint that makes any single image so exact can read, in bulk, as chilliness. This is a volume to open at random and settle inside for a few pages, not to march through end to end.

Set it on the table before a still-life session. One stem, a sheet of black card, a single raking light: that is the entire toolkit these pictures argue for, and the argument is that it is enough. Cut everything else away. Then look at the stem the way he looked, until the flower gives up being a flower and starts behaving like a body under studio light.