Sumo

£6,000.00

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, commented Benedikt Taschen, the publisher behind SUMO--and that has certainly been achieved. Weighing 30 kg and measuring 50 x 70cm, and breaking any previous record in book publishing, SUMO contains 480 pages covering every aspect of Newton s outstanding career in photography. Each copy of SUMO is bound by hand and numbered and signed by the artist. In order to show this colossus off, designer Philippe Starck has created a unique device for displaying the book at home. This incredible 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. --Catherine Taylor