LADY LISA LYON

Photographs: Robert Mapplethorpe
Text by: Bruce Chatwin
Publisher: Schirmer/Mosel
Year: 1983
Edition: First Edition
Format: Hardcover with dust jacket
Language: German / English
Condition: Very Good — dust jacket shows light wear; interior clean and well preserved.

Lady Lisa Lyon is one of Robert Mapplethorpe’s most celebrated photobooks, documenting his sustained collaboration with bodybuilder Lisa Lyon and his radical reimagining of the body as a site of sculpture, performance, and visual construction.

Through a series of meticulously staged photographs, Mapplethorpe presents Lyon in poses that draw upon classical sculpture, religious iconography, fashion, and the traditions of studio portraiture. Controlled lighting, precise composition, symmetry, and an almost sculptural attention to surface transform the body into an image of formal discipline and monumental presence.

Lyon’s physique becomes the central material of the work: simultaneously powerful and delicate, athletic and elegant, masculine and feminine. Mapplethorpe deliberately destabilizes conventional representations of strength and gender, treating the body not simply as a record of physical achievement but as an object capable of continuous transformation through pose, gesture, costume, and light.

Bruce Chatwin’s accompanying text extends the book beyond photographic portraiture, situating Lyon and Mapplethorpe’s collaboration within a broader conversation around the body, identity, aesthetics, and classical ideals. The resulting publication occupies an unusual position between photobook, artist’s book, portrait study, and contemporary reinterpretation of the nude.

A landmark of late-20th-century photographic publishing and a defining document of Mapplethorpe’s pursuit of beauty, control, sexuality, and formal perfection.