This sumptuous photograph admits Lee Ka-sing to a club of peerless flower photographers--which includes Edward Steichen, Imogen Cunningham, Baron Adolphe de Meyer and Robert Mapplethorpe. In Ka-sing's photo (titled "An Opera"), the left-to-right rhythm set up by the two coral and empurpled roses, so vulvically intimate in their plushy internality, is prologue to our audience with the noble, stalwart white rose at the right. Miss Stein may have enjoyed proclaiming that a rose is a rose is a rose, but there is hierarchy here: the white rose rules, and attracts admirers, like the two fluttery blooms at the left.
