Greatest of All Time. A Tribute to Muhammad Ali

'Greatest of All Time' began its life as a monster. In its original incarnation it was among the largest and heaviest books ever commercially published, a piece of furniture disguised as a volume, priced like a used car and delivered on a stand of its own. Whatever edition reaches your hands, that origin sets the terms: this is a book conceived as a monument to a man who was already a monument, and it behaves like one the moment it lands on a table.

The stand was never a gimmick. The original edition arrived with a purpose-built base to hold it upright, because no ordinary shelf could take the weight, and even the smaller later editions inherit that appetite for excess. The implication is always the same: a normal book would have been an insult to the subject.

The photography goes a long way toward justifying the ambition. The great Ali image-makers are gathered here: Neil Leifer's overhead of the champion standing over a flattened Sonny Liston, Howard Bingham's decades of intimate access, Thomas Hoepker's fist thrust straight at the lens, work by Gordon Parks and Carl Fischer among them. Collected in one place at this size, the pictures make a quiet argument that Ali was among the most photogenic figures of the twentieth century, a fighter who treated the camera as a second ring. The plates are printed large enough to register as the events they recorded rather than as illustrations of them.

A few images carry the whole legend on their own. Leifer's Lewiston knockout, shot from directly above with the ring painted into a perfect frame, is arguably the most famous sports photograph ever made, and seeing it at this scale explains why. Around it the book assembles the quieter register too: Ali clowning for children, praying, waiting in locker rooms, aging, so the icon is occasionally allowed to be a person.

The counterargument is about use, and it is not trivial. A book this large and this costly is genuinely hard to live with; it does not rest on a lap, it resists casual reading, and in its grander forms it asks for a room instead of a shelf. Some of the surrounding apparatus, the tributes and the testimonials, tips into hagiography, and a reader who wants Ali's contradictions alongside his glory will find the volume firmly in praise mode.

What settles the matter is being honest about what the book is for. This is a celebration, not a biography, and taken as a celebration it delivers precisely what it promises: the definitive visual gathering of a man who spent much of his life in front of lenses. The editing, credited to Steve Crist, who brought the same collector's instinct to 'The Polaroid Book,' understands that the images are the argument and mostly steps out of their way. The lessons for a portrait shooter are oblique but real, in how a single subject photographed by many hands over many years accumulates into something larger than any one frame could hold, and in how celebrity imagery earns iconographic weight when the subject treats the camera as a collaborator instead of an intrusion.

Buy it for the pictures and the sheer heft, not for the whole man; the book made its choice long ago about which Ali to enshrine, and it has never once pretended otherwise.