Altars (1995), signed by Edmund White

• Published: Random House, New York, 1995
• Contributors: Essay by Edmund White; edited and designed by Mark Holborn and Dimitri Levas
• Edition: First edition
• Binding: Black cloth lettered in red, dust jacket, publisher's slipcase
• Pages: 139 pp.
• Dimensions: approx. 30.5 x 28 cm (12 x 11 in)
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0-679-42721-6
• Signature: Signed by Edmund White.
• Condition: Fine in fine dust jacket

Mapplethorpe often traced his love of symmetry to the altars of the Catholic churches of his childhood in Floral Park, Queens. Altars, assembled after his death by Mark Holborn and Dimitri Levas, follows that thread through the whole of his work: early collages and constructions built from religious images, Polaroids, portraits and previously unpublished colour prints, 127 plates in all.

Edmund White's essay reads the sacred and the erotic in Mapplethorpe as one subject. White knew the downtown world both men belonged to, and he writes about it from inside.

Signed by White, who died in June 2025.

Photographs of this copy available on request.