The Making of Helmut Newton's SUMO

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Ten years after. By June Newton.

One day in Los Angeles in the year 1997 Helmut received a call from Benedikt Taschen, the German publisher, who was staying in a hotel minutes away from ours and told him he had something to show him. So, Helmut went off to see what it was. Shortly after, I received a call from Helmut telling me to drop everything and come at once. I obeyed his order and walked the few blocks to Benedikt’s hotel and took the lift to his suite, to find Benedikt and Helmut awaiting my reaction to what eventually became known as SUMO—the most expensive 20th-century book at a charity auction in Berlin on 6 April 2000.

A magnificent piece of work, the brainchild of a publisher who was to change the world of publishing. A daring maverick of a man. I fell in love with it immediately. It was an empty maquette, except for a few printed pages. One of which was a snap that Helmut had taken of me in our apartment in the Marais in Paris. It was taken after dinner one evening in our kitchen. I was wearing an Ossie Clark peignoir and Helmut, who always had a camera ready, asked me to open up, but Benedikt’s wit had nothing to do with my immediate reaction to something I’d never seen before.

Helmut was reticent but I wasn’t. That evening began a lifelong friendship and it is fitting that, in Helmut’s absence, "Ten Years After", this smaller edition of SUMO will coincide with an exhibition of the original pages from the book that many admirers of Helmut’s work could not afford to buy.
—June Newton

SUMO: A Landmark Revisited. By Philippe Garner.

Helmut always demonstrated a healthy disdain for easy or predictable solutions. SUMO—a bold and, certainly within the traditions of photography, an unprecedented publishing venture—was an irresistible project. The idea of a spectacular compendium of images, reproduced to exceptional page size and to state-of-the-art origination and printing standards, emerged from an open, exploratory dialogue between photographer and publisher. Helmut liked to probe possibilities, ever eager to rethink the ways in which he could develop and extend the all-important interface between his work and his audience. The magazine page had been the constant on which he had built his career; from the mid-1970s, books and exhibitions offered further opportunities, allowing him to exploit more extended picture sequences and significant changes of print scale. Here, with the physically commanding SUMO, weighing in—boxed and shrink-wrapped—at 35.4 kilos, Helmut created, at the close of the 20th century, a landmark book that would stand head and shoulders above anything that had been attempted conceptually or technically before. SUMO, complete with its bespoke lectern, set an ambitious new standard—a book with the dimension of a private exhibition.

SUMO might also be interpreted as a triumph of another order, with a very particular political and cultural significance that made it a singularly emotive and gratifying achievement. For here was a forceful statement, implicit rather than baldly stated—and all the stronger for that—confirming the authority of an unusually gifted individual’s perspective and emphatically marking his determination to engage an audience on his terms—in short, a statement about freedom of expression.

Helmut ranks among the foremost figurative artists of his era. A social commentator of exceptional insight, his was a distinct and surprising sensibility—perverse, with a sharp and insistent curiosity, perfectly leavened by wry humour. Helmut’s talent was uniquely personal and he had the ability to turn into a valuable creative resource everything that he experienced, including the turmoil of those formative years in which brutal and traumatic political realities disrupted all that had been agreeable and stable in his life. An at-first reluctant exile, he adapted imaginatively to his itinerant destiny. Helmut developed a finely calibrated sensitivity to the atmosphere of place and to everything he observed—notably to the subtleties of social codes and rituals and to the visual language of seduction and of style. He took inspiration from his nostalgic fondness for the evocative symbols of old Europe, the Europe of his youth; and he embraced with fascination the vulgar New Babylons of the U. S., particularly Los Angeles. As he matured, he learned to use that matchless eye and twisted perception to create a body of work that is to its age as significant a document as are, for instance, the satirical caricatures of William Hogarth to the excesses of 18th-century Britain, the drawings of Honoré Daumier to the social nuances of French life in the mid-19th century or the savage visual dissections of George Grosz to the decadence of that very Berlin into which Helmut was born.

Helmut truly found his form once he settled in Paris. There, he defined for himself a creative role within a chic high Bohemia, the milieu of interlinked friends and professional associates in the worlds of fashion, the media and the arts that was the stimulating crucible for his work. In his rue Aubriot studio in the 1970s, he stored his Kodachrome transparencies in small cabinets labelled "Fashion", "Erotic subjects" and "Portraits mondains"; but of course his genius was to wilfully blur these distinctions, building a multilayered social portrait in which subtle allusions and telling undercurrents lent every picture intrigue and reverberation.

Helmut travelled widely, but always carried with him the precious and poignant memories of his native Germany; and these feelings drew him back with increasing regularity to the country and culture that had shaped him. There was an irresistible logic in the fact that the four issues of Helmut Newton’s Illustrated that he produced between 1985 and 1995 should take their inspiration from then-new photo-illustrated journals that had inspired him in the 1930s. Germany could boast a long and significant tradition in the story of publishing, since the flowering of printing in the pioneering era of Johannes Gutenberg; and Helmut had, at first hand, witnessed its tragic corollary with the repression and the book burning of the Nazis. This observation calls to mind Helmut’s cool-headed response some years ago to the report that a lecture he had been invited to deliver to a university audience would be disrupted by a group of students planning to throw raw meat at this speaker, whose work they were only prepared to perceive through the prism of their own rigid prejudices. Helmut’s judicious opening remarks situated him immediately as one who was lucky to have escaped the increasingly vicious purges of the late 1930s and who had surely earned the right to freedom of artistic expression—and the right, as a working photographer, to challenge and to provoke. The student anger was defused and by the end of his talk all were ready to offer up their resounding applause for an artist with the courage and tenacity to pursue his creative instinct to the full and who, through his witty, sophisticated and confrontational images, was determined to throw down the gauntlet against the mediocre, the safe and the superficial.

SUMO, appropriately published in Germany, has made its memorable statement as a piece of photo-book history. Its size and consequent costliness, however, inevitably limited its diffusion. This new edition is the fulfilment of an ambition conceived some years ago by Helmut. He would surely be pleased that, a decade on from its first publication, SUMO—now in a format that allows for a more democratic distribution—will reach the widest possible audience.
—Philippe Garner

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Helmut Newton, SUMO

Hardcover, with bookholder, 26.7 x 37.4 cm (10.5 x 14.7 in.), 464 pages
$ 150.00

Finally back in print! This 10th Anniversary Edition shares the same DNA as the original record-breaking Limited Edition, which has quintupled in price since its publication in 1999.

Hollywood, December 1997: Benedikt Taschen with the handmade dummy of SUMO when first presenting his idea of producing a gigantic book to stunned Helmut and June Newton in his suite at the Sunset Marquis Hotel. Photo: Helmut Newton

Monte Carlo, February 1999: While June Newton is finalizing the picture edit, Helmut Newton is putting his signature on the pages which were subsequently bound into SUMO. Signing the entire print run of 10,000 copies plus 200 artist’s proofs over a period of five months was not Newton’s favorite part of the production. Photo: Helmut Newton/Alice Springs

Cologne, September 1998: Helmut and June Newton checking the proofs with TASCHEN’s Head of Prepress Horst Neuzner. Up to six proofs per print were necessary to meet their perfectionist quality standards.

Paris, December 1998: Philippe Starck working on the design of the stainless steel SUMO table at his studio.

Cologne, March 1999: The entire TASCHEN production team involved in the making of SUMO with the Newtons at the publishing house.