Published by Getty Publications in 2016, *Robert Mapplethorpe: The Photographs* considers an artist whose exacting ideas of beauty remain inseparable from debates around sexuality, identity, and representation. Rather than reduce Mapplethorpe to the controversies that polarized responses to his work, the book places those disputes within the larger compass of his career and continuing influence on photographers testing the medium’s aesthetic and conceptual limits.

The publication draws on two closely related bodies of material: the collection acquired jointly in 2011 by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, and the Mapplethorpe Archive at the Getty Research Institute. This institutional foundation gives Paul Martineau and Britt Salvesen access to photographs and archival resources through which the work can be considered alongside the circumstances of its production and reception.

More than 250 illustrations convey the range of Mapplethorpe’s photographic practice, while essays address sexuality and identity in depth. The resulting structure is both visual survey and critical study: individual images retain their formal force, but the accompanying scholarship establishes connections across the artist’s career and examines how his conception of beauty could be disciplined, provocative, and culturally contested at once.

Issued in conjunction with the exhibition *Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium*, shown at the Getty, LACMA, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the book records a significant museum-led reassessment. For a serious collection, its interest lies not in claims of rarity but in the conjunction of substantial illustration, archival access, and focused interpretation. It offers a grounded point of entry into Mapplethorpe’s practice while preserving the complexity that has made his legacy resistant to simple judgment.