Picture: Muhammad Ali

Muhammad Ali was born Cassius Clay in Louisville, Kentucky in 1942. At twelve years old, he won his first Kentucky Golden Gloves bout, and the photographers of Louisville’s Courier-Journal were there. That relationship, built on proximity and trust, would span nearly six decades, producing one of the most intimate and sustained photographic archives of any athlete in history. Ali gave the Courier-Journal photographers something he gave no one else: access to his entire life, inside the ring and out, his training camps and his quiet mornings, his family and his faith, his humor and his solitude. The New York Times described the collection as standing apart for its intimacy: Ali reading a newspaper on his hotel bed, tickling his daughters, surprising his mother with a new car, jogging with his wife in the early-morning fog of his training grounds.

Picture: Muhammad Ali is the first in a two-volume series drawn from that archive, a collection of extraordinarily intimate photographs, many never before published, that offers even the most knowledgeable Ali fan a new perspective on the Greatest of All Time.

de.MO designed the book, sports photography book design for a document of one of the most celebrated and searched figures in the history of sport, drawing the full emotional range of the Courier-Journal archive into a single, considered volume.