Mario Testino. SIR

A man in a dark suit turns back over his shoulder, half amused, entirely aware of the lens. Mario Testino builds SIR around exactly that posture, the composure of someone who knows he is being watched and has quietly decided to enjoy the attention. The collection gathers men across three decades of his fashion and personal work, the famous beside the anonymous, the tailored beside the stripped down, every one of them photographed with the same appetite for ease.

The framing Testino offers in the opening pages is disarmingly plain: these are simply the men who shaped how he understands style. It reads less like a thesis than a confession of taste. Nothing here tries to define masculinity, and the collection is stronger for that modesty, held together by a consistent point of view, not an argument it would only lose.

The reach is wide. Actors, athletes, musicians, princes, models built for a single campaign, friends caught loose in a hotel room. Testino slides between the polished grammar of advertising and something looser and more candid, and the sequencing sets those two registers against each other across a spread. A lacquered studio portrait lands beside a frame that looks grabbed on the way out a door, and the proximity flatters both of them.

A pattern surfaces the longer you look. Testino likes a man who is comfortable being desired and untroubled by it, and he photographs that comfort as a form of quiet authority rather than swagger. Even the undressed portraits read as studies in bearing more than provocation, closer to classical sculpture than to the men's magazine, and the restraint is a choice he makes again and again.

Clothing does real work in these frames, and Testino treats it as character rather than decoration. A well-cut jacket, an open collar, the particular slouch of a man who dressed without trying too hard: the wardrobe tells you who someone is before the face gets its chance. He came up inside fashion and never lost the eye for how fabric falls, yet the styling here rarely upstages the person wearing it. The suit serves the man, never the label, which is its own quiet argument about what elegance is actually for.

For a portrait shooter the lessons arrive as craft before mood. Testino lights men to look expensive without turning them glassy, holding a little texture in the skin and letting the eyes carry the wattage. He is unafraid of a straight-on gaze, and he trusts wardrobe and posture to carry work that weaker fashion photography hands off to retouching. The color runs rich without going candied, and the black-and-white frames are confident enough to hold a face with almost nothing else in play.

Set against the rest of his published work, SIR reads as a deliberate counterweight. The books that made his name, Kate Moss by Mario Testino among them, largely concern women and the vast machinery of glamour assembled around them. Here he turns the same fluency on men, and the shift exposes how much of the craft is really about permission, coaxing a subject into being looked at without flinching.

Glamour at this volume carries a cost. It can begin to feel weightless, and a reader after interior life over surface will not always be satisfied here. Still, the collection knows precisely what it is, an extended look at how men perform confidence for a camera and how a generous photographer hands that confidence back. Testino flatters his subjects, and he never once pretends otherwise.