Thursday, March 8, 2018

Helmut Newton: SUMO, Revised by June Newton XL Hardcover – September 21, 2009 by June Newton (Editor),‎ Helmut Newton (Artist) (Taschen) (IBRArtBooks)




Bringing an entirely new slant to the concept of the coffee-table book, SUMO is a suitably enormous homage to 79-year-old Helmut Newton, the master of subversive and erotic photography. "I wanted to build a monument to the most important photographer of the 20th century," comments Benedikt Taschen, the publisher behind SUMO. He delivers. Weighing over 65 pounds, measuring more than two feet long, and breaking any previous size record in book publishing, SUMO contains 480 pages of every aspect of Newton's outstanding career in photography. Each copy of the book is bound by hand and numbered and signed by the artist. In order to showcase this colossus, the book is packaged with its own stand designed by Philippe Starck.

This outsized volume contains the body of Newton's controversial yet iconographic work, documenting fashion, fetishism, and above all an overriding obsession with voyeurism that can make the viewer feel complicit or uneasy by turns. Newton himself describes SUMO as "terrifying and outrageous. I don't even look at it as a book.... I look at it as an object."

Helmut Newton's SUMO published by TASCHEN has been judged the Best Book on Photography Published in 1999 by world-renowned International Center of Photography.

SUMO, the biggest and most costly book ever produced, was judged best in a field of outstanding photography books published in the last year of the 20th century. Conceived as a monumental tribute to Helmut Newton, arguably the most influential and controversial of contemporary photographers, SUMO has become a star in its own right by winning this honor in a field filled with worthy books devoted to photography." --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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