Although photographers haven’t traditionally assumed the same level of respect within the artistic world as have painters or sculptors, fashion and society photographers throughout the past century – Herb Ritts, Richard Avedon, immortalised by Fred Astaire in the 1957 musical film Funny Face, and Helmut Newton – have gained a considerable level of status. Indeed, the late Ritts was the subject of a retrospective survey of both familiar and unseen photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1996, where it broke exhibition visitor records with more than 253,000 visitors, despite criticism that, according to Cathy Horyn, “the museum was pandering to a celebrity-obsessed public.” The exhibition was restaged at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 2012. In the same year, Newton was the subject of his first major retrospective in France at the Grand Palais, Paris, while a foundation in his name maintains a large, permanent space and rotating exhibitions of his work’s various thematic threads in Berlin.

It stands to reason then that fashion photographers today enjoy a level of recognition almost in tandem with the advertising campaigns which bear their names, and whilst living and working, many, including Mario Testino, Steven Klein, Inez Van Lamswoorde and Vinoodh Matadin, Terry Richardson and Juergen Teller, have exhibited their fashion photographs on a considerable scale via highly respected museums and art dealers. And following a spate of hard cover, beautifully-produced books, Mr Testino this season releases a brand new tome: Sir. Comprising more than 300 archival photographs and limited in its print run to an exclusive 1000 copies, Sir traces the evolution of male identity over the past three decades, bringing together the photographer’s work in costume, portraiture, photo-journalism and fashion. “The way men are seen in photography, in fashion, and the way that men look at pictures of themselves has changed in recent years,” explains Mr Testino. “It is a subject that has come into focus: the masculine image, a man’s personal style, changing attitudes to the male face and body.”

Alosian Vivancos, Alex Sanchez de Mora, Miguel Dotto, Carlos Torregrosa, Alex Ardid, Alvaro Navarrette, Marcos Linares and Antonio Lomar, Madrid, Vogue Spain, 2012.

Mario Testino’s SIR will be released in March by Taschen.