Annie Leibovitz

The Library Essay

Size is part of the reading

Taschen’s SUMO format began in 1999 with Helmut Newton, a book measuring seventy by fifty centimetres, issued in ten thousand signed copies and raised on a metal stand designed by Philippe Starck. The house learned from it that a photograph printed large enough to be approached rather than held changes the posture of the person looking, and that a volume which cannot be shelved in the ordinary way takes on the standing of furniture. The Leibovitz book, published in 2014 in an edition of nine thousand signed and numbered copies, was made on that model, with 476 pages, eight fold-outs and a bookstand designed by Marc Newson.

She drew the selection from more than forty years of work, beginning with the reportage made for Rolling Stone in the 1970s and continuing through the composed portraiture of her Vanity Fair and Vogue years. A separate companion book carries essays by Graydon Carter, Steve Martin, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Paul Roth, along with notes on each of the more than 250 photographs, which leaves the plates themselves to run without captions.

The format rewards the quality her pictures are usually praised for and rarely observed at close range. Across a page this wide, the arrangement of a face, a body and a room reads as deliberate labour, and the viewer follows the decisions rather than only their effect.