Helmut Newton. SUMO. 20th Anniversary Edition

The Library Essay

A Photobook You Need Furniture For

When Taschen published Helmut Newton's SUMO in 1999 it was a deliberate provocation of scale, a book of photographs too large and too heavy to hold, issued in a signed edition of ten thousand with a stand designed by Philippe Starck. Copy number one, signed by many of its famous subjects, later sold at auction for a record price for any book published in the twentieth century.

Inside the spectacle is a career, four decades of Newton's cool, confrontational photographs of fashion, wealth and the body, made mostly for the European magazines. The twentieth-anniversary edition of 2019, edited like the original by June Newton, brings the monument down to a bookshelf scale while keeping the stand, and the swagger.