From the 1980s Mapplethorpe devoted himself more and more to representing the body and extreme sexuality. His nudes still provoke, but a careful, slowed-down look can only feel wonder and admiration for the perfection of that plastic, classical beauty, sculpted by light, and for an incredibly elegant black and white. The same gaze runs coherently through all his work and subjects, from the very first Polaroids of the 1970s to the flowers he charged with a provocative, enveloping sensuality. Transgression and classicism, pornography and purity: the binaries of his revolutionary work. The book gathers much of his output and accompanies the large retrospective at Forma in Milan.