Lady Lisa Lyon (1983)

• Published: The Viking Press, New York, 1983
• Contributors: Foreword by Sam Wagstaff; text by Bruce Chatwin
• Edition: First edition, first printing (cloth issue)
• Binding: Black cloth, photographic dust jacket (price-clipped)
• Pages: 128 pp.
• Dimensions: approx. 28 x 23 cm (11 x 9 in)
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0-670-43012-9
• Signature: Signed by Mapplethorpe on the half-title.
• Condition: Fine in a very near fine dust jacket.

Between 1980 and 1983 Mapplethorpe photographed Lisa Lyon, winner of the first World Women's Bodybuilding Championship in 1979, again and again: in the studio and outdoors, nude and in costume. Lady was the book that came out of that collaboration, and his first monograph from a trade publisher.

Its subject is the body as something made: shaped by training, then shaped again by the camera into the classical forms Mapplethorpe prized. Bruce Chatwin's introduction treats Lyon as a performer of many selves, and read now the book anticipates by several years the idea of gender as performance that Judith Butler set out in 1990.