'I bet you could get me good flowers.' Levas rose to the challenge and soon discovered the best blooms at the Saturday market on West 28th Street. 'No one gets me good flowers, Dimitri,' Mapplethorpe said to him. The settings are often minimalist, the blooms – single or in small groups – lovingly photographed with dramatic contrasts of light and shade.ĭimitri Levas first met Mapplethorpe in 1978 and describes in his introduction to the book how he became his assistant. Gradually his technique and equipment changed by 1977, he had acquired a Hasselblad camera, and the luscious square-format black-and-white flower studies that became his trademark began to emerge. Several of these early Polaroids appear in the new book, their sepia tones and domestic settings recalling the 19th-century photos which Mapplethorpe enjoyed collecting with his lover, the connoisseur Sam Wagstaff. Up until this time, the artist, who grew up in Queens and studied graphic design at New York's Pratt Institute, had been making assemblages rather than taking photographs, and he used the Polaroid technology to practise composition and lighting in his new-found field. Mapplethorpe's earliest pictures of flowers date from 1973, not long after he had been given a Polaroid camera by his friend John McKendry, curator of prints and photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
