Send your best wishes with the beautifully reproduced artwork on these full-colour convenient QuickNotes, packaged in a medium sized keepsake box with magnetic closure. Just a few examples of Robert Mapplethorpe's exquisite photography is reproduced in full colour as notecards, including 4 beautifully observed flower still life images for a sophisticated stationery set. Our museum quality QuickNotes are perfect to keep on hand for any occasion notes and greetings to friends and family. 20 notecards and envelopes 5 each of 4 images Packaged in a soft matte finish keepsake box Magnetic closure, perfectly reusable for desk or dresser accessories Cards printed on coated paper stock to bring out their full colour Cards and envelopes bundled together with a paper belly band inside each box

A classic, indeed perhaps the best of the Mapplethorpe books. And for many most certainly the most typical Mapplethorpe, now available once again thanks to this re-edition. The Black Book, first published in 1986, presents 96 formally stringent and highly erotic nudes, all of them photographs of black men, either as full figures, or staged as details, as fragments of their bodies. Stylized as classical statues or provocatively in all their presence and sensuous radiance. Black-and-white photography was Mapplethorpe's preferred medium. And his obsessive aesthetics was based on completely mastering it, as this enabled him to visualize any number of tonal gradations and penetrate deep into the very pores of the gleaming black skin. It is a method that reached a climax in these images. The Black Book, Mapplethorpe s homage to the black male body, has always been one of the most important visual contributions to the discussion on beauty, sensuality, and sexuality in photography.