First published in 1986, shortly before Mapplethorpe's early death, The Black Book fascinates and shocks today as much as it did then — only the direction of the argument has changed. The questions that preoccupied the censors of the 1980s are now taken up by museums; they are no longer the object of legal dispute but of sociological and formal analysis. Through his studio portraits of Black men, the volume remains one of the most discussed bodies of work of its decade.