GOAT SUMO

When TASCHEN released the original GOAT in 2003, the pitch was scale as tribute: eight hundred pages, some thirty kilograms, a price that ran into five figures, the most extravagant object a publisher had yet dared to build around a single human being. The SUMO edition is its more sensible descendant, still enormous, no longer requiring furniture of its own. The subject, at least, could carry any amount of grandeur thrown at him. Muhammad Ali was the most photographed athlete of the century and arguably its most photographed man.

And yet, as a thing to actually use, this edition works against itself. It is too large to open on a normal table, too heavy to hold for long, too costly to leave anywhere a child or a coffee cup might reach it. A working photographer wants images at a size the eye can study and the hand can return to. What the SUMO format delivers instead is spectacle, a monument you visit rather than a resource you consult. Reverence is the only posture it allows, and reverence is a poor teacher.

Which is a genuine shame, because the pictures gathered inside are the real history of twentieth-century sports photography. Neil Leifer's overhead of Ali standing over a flattened Sonny Liston, gloves cocked, is among the most reproduced frames the genre has ever made. Flip Schulke's underwater training shots turned a heavyweight into a strange aquatic dancer. Carl Fischer's 1968 Esquire cover, Ali pierced with arrows like a martyred saint, did as much for the myth as any bout. Thomas Hoepker, Gordon Parks, Howard Bingham, who spent decades at Ali's side and made the most complete record anyone has: the roster reads like a survey of how a public figure gets built out of light.

What these photographers understood, and what survives the packaging, is that Ali was a collaborator, never merely a subject. He performed for the lens as fluently as he did for the crowd, and the great pictures catch the seam between the performance and the man behind it. The lesson worth carrying out of the whole enterprise is that simple: the most photographable people are the ones who treat the camera as a partner. The freight around the images teaches nothing. The images teach plenty.

So admire the SUMO for what it is, a shrine, a flex, a birthday present for someone who already owns everything else. If what you are after is the photography rather than the spectacle, hunt down Howard Bingham's record of Ali or a Neil Leifer collection at a size you can prop on a desk and learn from. The Champ's Edition and its giant kin were always about the gesture. The pictures were always better served small enough to see.