The "Sumo," a $15,000 book that weighs more than my dog
This morning there are various articles here and there cataloguing the best April Fools Day pranks from yesterday. (I'm afraid I didn't really get the YouTube one, because, try as I might, I'm not up on my viral videos.)
Our award goes to Joerg Colberg at Conscientious for "Coming Soon: The Complete Winogrand." It's sort of an insider's inside joke: you have to know who Winogrand was and that he was a notoriously heavy shooter (he actually left slightly less than 9,000 undeveloped rolls of film when he died, not 2,500), and it gently lampoons various over-the-top publishing ventures such as Benedikt Taschen's Helmut Newton Sumo and Gerhard Steidl's Frank Project, which recently extended to a book that publishes the amateur snapshots of Robert Frank's father, Henry Frank (I know that sounds like a lampoon too, but it's true).
(There's a wimp version of Sumo for those of you not in the habit of spending the price of a small car on a single volume. It's a mere 4 1/2 inches thick and less than 16 lbs. As for the Frank Project, you pick and choose, you pick and choose.)
Mike
(Thanks to JC)
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Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.
Featured Comment by Bob: "One of the best 'photo fools' was that perpetrated by the U.K. mag Amateur Photographer in the 1950s...they published a landscape where a cat had come to sit in the foreground just as the shot was taken. AP mentioned that the cat was a new photo accessory that could be inflated and placed for foreground interest. The joke backfired when several thousand readers all wrote in to ask where they could buy one!"
Featured Comment by ian: "Amusingly, 'Taschen' means pocket, as in pocket-sized edition."
If amazon extends the free shipping policy to the exhaustive Winogrand compendium, I'm in.
Posted by: Rob Atkins | Saturday, 02 April 2011 at 03:04 PM
That sounds scary... but again, my dogs were great danes for a long time.
Posted by: Max | Saturday, 02 April 2011 at 03:10 PM
Mike,
I was expecting you to feature The Invisible Camera, which is quite excellent. And if I had remembered to send it to you, you might have. Sorry for my slackness; better late than never:
http://www.theinvisiblecamera.com/
Posted by: Robin Dreyer | Saturday, 02 April 2011 at 03:19 PM
There is a smaller version at only $150.00
Interesting video's here.
http://www.taschen.com/pages/en/community/video/30310.helmut_newtons_sumo_part_1.htm
Posted by: Carl L | Saturday, 02 April 2011 at 03:43 PM
When is a book a "book" and not an overly large collection of related paper? In my old university library there is a collection of maps of the North West Frontier in about 1905-1920. It's a proper printer's production, not an ad hoc collection, with frontispiece and index. The maps are each larger than the Newton book in two dimensions (I remember the long edge exceeded my outstretched arm), and the collection has been bound in leather-faced board with some gold-blocked lettering. The maps run from north to south, from the Hindu Kush to the Indian Ocean. I don't recall how many there are - perhaps 100. The weight of the "book" is from memory at least the weight of a large bag of dog food, which I buy in 20 kilo bags.
I'm wondering if Taschen are guilty of false advertising? Clearly, it's not the biggest "book" production of the 20th Century, nor on insurance value the most expensive. They may be OK on weight though.
Of much more importance than some transient advertising nonsense is the sense of history I felt as I looked through the maps. Not only were they cartographic records where none had probably been recorded since Alexander the Great passed by, but annotations, shadings and the use of colour indicated tribal loyalties, tax districts, the remit of certain laws, and population. They were compiled by civil servants and military officers travelling from village to village over dozens of years.
Sadly, there was no nude on the front cover to attract the passing eye, but there was a lot more intellectual meat in the volume than Newton has, I'll bet.
Posted by: James | Saturday, 02 April 2011 at 04:26 PM
Dammit, pranked again.
Posted by: Christopher Lane | Saturday, 02 April 2011 at 04:46 PM
I fell for the Winogrand prank, I didn't even think about the date. I followed the link and realised that I was born the day before
Posted by: Sean | Saturday, 02 April 2011 at 04:49 PM
yes! Conscientious had me clicking the link for more info alright! Our own site ditched the film for digital, but I don't think too many noticed :)
Posted by: Rory O'Toole | Saturday, 02 April 2011 at 05:20 PM
I really liked the digital cartridges for film cameras. FlexiSensor technology, indeed!
Posted by: emptyspaces | Sunday, 03 April 2011 at 09:39 AM
Sumo 'limited' edition of 10,000 at $15,000
each. Does anyone know how many have
been sold. Talk about excess.
Posted by: daugav369pils | Sunday, 03 April 2011 at 03:49 PM
Actually I had planed to set a date to go to the library in San Diego's MOPA just to see the large Sumo. So we at least know of one that has sold.
Posted by: Chad Thompson | Sunday, 03 April 2011 at 05:20 PM
Since when is a limited edition 10,000 items? Did Newton sign them all in one (very long) sitting? Were they numbered by hand: 4852/10,000; 4853/10,000? And how about the gross if the full limited edition sold out: $150,000,000.
Somehow the Complete Winogrand sounds more believable than Sumo.
Posted by: J. G. Baker | Sunday, 03 April 2011 at 11:22 PM
Regarding the digital insert announcement, I don't know if it's a joke or not. If it isn't, their timing was singularly unfortunate. It might not be a joke, because as far back as the mid-1990s, there was a company developing just such a thing. Said company was entirely capable of making such a product, even back then. The reason it never hit market was that it was impossible to keep up with the rapidly advancing technology and to come out with an insert that actually cost LESS than a whole digital camera (counterintuitive, but true). Their price/performance ratio for the digital insert never favored buying one. While you had lots of photographers who said they would love to be able to use their old film camera bodies to make digital photographs, you didn't have so many when you told them that the insert was going to cost more and perform worse than just buying a dedicated body.
I'm not at all convinced the situation has changed enough since then to make it commercially feasible to produce such an insert today. So, serious or not, I wouldn't count on being able to buy this.
pax \ Ctein
[ Please excuse any word-salad. MacSpeech in training! ]
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Posted by: ctein | Tuesday, 05 April 2011 at 03:46 AM
Thanks for the heads up. I will keep a look out.
Posted by: cns949 | Thursday, 07 April 2011 at 03:41 PM
Re-35, This is their notice now at the web page, assuming you enable java scripting there that is:
Re-35 does not really exist. We (the design company Rogge & Pott) created Re-35 as an exercise in identity-design. We invented the "product" because it was something, that we had wished for for a long time (as many others).
We launched the website and sent out "press releases" on April first - thinking, that the date would make clear, that Re35 is just wishful thinking - a classic April Fools Prank!
A lot of people didn’t hear about Re-35 until after April first, so we added this disclaimer
Posted by: richard | Thursday, 07 April 2011 at 06:18 PM