01.06.09
Helmut Newton Profile
Helmut Newton (né Neustädter) was born in 1920, in Berlin, to wealth, Jewishness, a delicate constitution and an American mother. ‘A very cruel woman,’ he has said. Family holidays were taken at Mittel European spas and grand hotels.
When he was eight, an older brother introduced him to the city’s red-light district. Among the sights was Red Erna who wore thigh-length boots and carried a whip. The Newton world is shaped by the shadow of those two realities — a kind of gutter luxe, a brother to the Parisian nights of his main photographic influence, Brassai.
At twelve, he bought a camera. At sixteen, he was apprenticed to Yva, a woman photographer who would die in the Holocaust. His late teens were filled with the kind of dramatic adventure we would all rather read about than endure. Briefly imprisoned in a concentration camp, he escaped the Nazi state and headed for China but got no further than Singapore. There, he worked as a reporter and a portrait photographer before being interned by the British and shipped off to a camp in Australia. Released after two years, he became a truck driver in the army, anglicised his name to Newton and married an actress, June Browne — who herself worked as a photographer under the name Alice Springs. They were together till his death.
Starting as a jobbing photographer, he soon found success in fashion. From 1952, he worked for Australian Vogue. In 1957, he moved to London under contract to its English counterpart. He found the city ‘sterile and unproductive’. Within two years, he was back in Australia. By 1961, he was in Paris, working for French Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. ‘The moment I hit Paris, I knew this was it for living and taking photographs. Beautiful women seemed to be everywhere.’
Then, in 1971, he had a heart attack. He photographed himself through the pain and procedures. Out of hospital, he began to create the visual world that would make his name well beyond art directors’ contacts books — Lady GaGa’s 'Paparazzi' video is merely the latest example of his influence.
Sexuality had always been there in magazine fashion photography, just unacknowledged. Newton put it in the foreground. Naked women. Strong women, physically, emotionally and sexually, with breasts and bodies of many shapes. Repositories and exciters of real lusts — unlike the pneumaticised breasts and plasticised surfaces of the skin trade. Groves of pubic hair. High heels, guns, bloodshed. Sometimes you feel like you’ve stumbled on stills from Alfred Hitchcock’s home movies — or the private pornographies of 1940s film noir stars.
A woman on all fours with a saddle on her back. A naked woman with a police dog. In ‘Sie kommen’ (Here they come!), five naked women stride towards the camera. They are an invading species, powerfully unconcerned by the photographer’s presence, thoughts or desires. Their sexuality is all the more profound for its seeming absence.
There was a colour Newton and a black and white Newton. The monochrome was a deep and rich midday, with lots of highlights but few shadows. The colour was often dark, danger-filled splashes of a few shades — black, naturally, and red, too, of course, but also a pale flesh, not white but lightly tanned. It’s the tonal palette of a high summer late afternoon or early evening, in an expensive Mediterranean hotel.
Like all the best fantasies, it knows it’s a fantasy — and enjoys that knowledge, particularly if the naïve viewer is suckered by it. Look at Newton’s 1973 self-portrait, on a 'hotel de passe' bed, camera to his eye, naked model splayed across his clothed and shod body. The scene is staged in the reflecting eye of a ceiling mirror — the sexual fantasist’s dreamed-for audience of themselves and their own desire. Of course, it’s meant to be funny. It wouldn’t be sexy otherwise.
He worked for a world of Vogues and for Elle, Marie Claire, Queen, Nova and Stern. He worked for Playboy but claimed the magazine found his work ‘too raunchy’. He shot campaigns for Absolut vodka, Jimmy Choo shoes, Lagerfeld perfume, Silk Cut cigarettes and Clarks desert boots. In the introduction to Newton’s transformational collection, his 1976 book 'White Women', Philippe Garner then of Sotheby’s wrote: ‘His is an art that depends on and pays homage to the greatest of pagan gods — money.’
He died aged 83, at the wheel of his car, on January 23, 2004. It happened in the grounds of the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard, a death whose sweet appositeness is only slightly marred by the fact that it was probably another heart attack that caused him to crash.
Pete Silverton
To see the work of Helmut Newton visit helmutnewton.com
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