It would seem that when the great American photographer Mapplethorpe pointed his camera at this flower, so stripped of everything that was not petals and corolla and framing it in an aura of smoke, he wanted to achieve a minimalist poetic image of it, as if he had in mind that famous phrase of Gertrude Stein’s, ‘Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose…’. Maria Luïsa Borràs