Stockland Martel

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Walter’s been shooting for Sports Illustrated for 47 years—he had his first assignment for the magazine when he was just 16. It’s pretty incredible, when you think about it. Now there’s a book that surveys his photographs for SI‘s famed Swimsuit Issue, to which he has contributed 23 times. Heaven is a 256-page collection of 200-plus images that Walter selected from his personal archives, arranged by his 16 favorite locations and featuring behind-the-scenes and previously unpublished photos.

“It was a lot harder to put this book together than I ever thought it would be,” Walter told me by phone from his home in Montauk. “My preceding book, Athlete, had no chapters, but the straight flow of the photos in that book didn’t work for this book. So we tried to organize it by the girls, but that didn’t work either. SI’s managing editor, Terry McDonnell, was the man who really structured this book. He defined it by locations.”

“Walter defined the sexiness of SI Swimsuit,” McDonell said in a press statement. “No one else could create a book like his appropriately titled Heaven.”

The New York Post is showcasing a gallery of Heaven-ly images:

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Click on the image to access the gallery.

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And VanityFair.com has done a video interview with Walter that’s a sort of guided tour of Heaven. “Flipping through the book’s pages with VF.com,” the video’s producer, Erica Singleton, writes, “he reveals which model had the best body, which one showed up wearing an obscene T-shirt and a rubber boa constrictor, and why one of his most famous shots—of Cheryl Tiegs in 1977—could not have been published today.” Click on the image below to take a look.

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