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Taschen obviously no longer requires originality.... Originality was once required according to their sex book editor's rejection email about my prior submission. I only wanted the highest quality book. I found that and it was definitely not them. Helmut Newton was an epic? An epic.............waste of talent. epic adj. 3. heroic; majestic; impressively great:
epic n 8. something worthy to form the subject of an epic
He started life as Helmut Neustädter. He was lucky as a wealthy
and mobile Jew that he could flee the Nazis. He started out life as a
privileged though tormented man by most modern standards and died as
an over-privileged artist with unprecedented access to nude celebrities
and models who was then determined to leave a legacy with a foundation.
This alone makes his life story easily a worthy subject of an epic.
He did the biggest and most expensive book production last century with Taschen.
It was too big to sit in your lap and came with a stand. It needed a
stand because it can not stand on its own artistic merits. It is a
compilation of mostly previously published work. Taschen currently
lists it at $15,000 if you can find it. It is sold out To make finding
it easier and to reduce the price, Taschen-US has decided to re-release
the book in a smaller and more intimate format in Oct 2009. If we look
at the total release value of 10,000 SUMO books at $15,000, it would be
150 million dollars. Ridiculous. Although Helmut Newton was one one of the first to shoot semi-nude and nude
models and call it fashion, there is really no Newton style to try to copy. A photo of a
nude human as an OBJECT of art was rarely, if ever, done by him. www.Figurenude.com has
eighteen photographers who easily surpass his "style" of "nude"
photography. I am one of them. FYI... Maybe a "Helmut nude" is just any female either showing a
nipple or almost showing something unfit for children to view.
Maybe his legacy is destined to be crude photos….err…err...rude photos…err
...oops;….err…err... nude photos that are crude and almost inappropriate as well as being an offensive display of cute women? I have done two books that are much, much better than Helmut Newton's SUMO.
Taschen says SUMO is a titanic book in every respect. Its first voyage is doomed to sink just as the ship was and June Newton's more intimate and unlimited reprint is the iceberg that will send the value of the first book to the ocean floor! The Curtis J Neeley Jr., MFA book Figurenude can be seen online as almost a three megabyte PDF. It is not a teasing preview of a layout or two, but the ENTIRE book. The ONLY edition sells for $937 and has a notorized guarantee that it will retain value. The printing quality is much higher than either version of SUMO anyway. It does not need a stand.
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