Netwon's disco-bloodbath work – of tawdry, sexy girls playing with whips and chains, or lounging on the beach in Maui in full-length couture, smoking and ravishing their fancy men – debuted around the same time as Laura Mulvey's still-popular critique of the "male gaze."
His work presented stylishly violent images – dramatically challenging not only the nature of fashion photography, but the act of seeing and being seen. He may have been leery of all the art shows: Newton loathed the word "art," and frequently stated that he "just took pictures" and and this work was "for a very definite purpose: to influence, to sell a product, in short, for propaganda."īut if Newton's art was propaganda, his message wasn't always obvious. Is Newton's work, which, for all its decadence, always featured women possessed of a certain robustness (of form or spirit) being newly celebrated for its remarkable currency? Vogue's comment on this also invokes a new world for women in and out of fashion: "For an industry that should be about empowering women of all shapes, sizes, and ages, too often the image of attractiveness it has projected has been entirely at odds with that message." This campaign stands as an unprecedented stance in the fashion industry who are now "specifying guidelines for a healthier diet vowing to identify and help those vulnerable to eating disorders establishing minimum age requirements for models creating a model-mentorship program and asking that models be provided with plentiful breaks and access to nutritious food during shoots and shows." This sense of availability I find erotic." By availability, he meant eagerness, the kind of salubrious-yet-dirty woman we are seeing in everything from Girls to the rise of sexy-nasty female comics, to the now infamous Anastasia Steele.Ĭoncomitantly, the new issue of (American) Vogue features Team USA's "Wonder Women," a poolside, black-banded J-Lo and a feature about Vogue International's commitment to the Council of Fashion Designers of America's Health Initiative. "I think the woman who gives the appearance of being available is sexually much more exciting than a woman who's completely distant. "There must be a certain look of availability in the women I photograph," Newton wrote in the book White Women. It follows a show of Newton's work at the Grand Palais in Paris and another one just launched in Los Angeles. And it would appear we are doing just that with the late, unparalleled Helmut Newton.Īlthough the infamous fashion photographer was killed in a car crash in 2004, he's back in the news this week with Three Boys from Pasadena, a new tribute to him in Berlin by his three most intimate protégées – Mark Arbeit, George Holz and Just Loomis.
In its anticipation, here is a guide through summer, through the lens of Helmut Newton – needless to say, the portraits of Isabella Rossellini, Françoise Sagan and Angelica Huston are my main point of interest.He is buried in Berlin beside Marlene Dietrich, who sang, so wearily, so hauntingly, of Falling in Love Again. But his interest lay in a different kind of photography: nights, cities and portraits of interesting people. The images most closely associated with his name are provocative and sexually charged (never lacking humour though), of highly made-up, statuesque, often nude women – he created alternate realities with his photos. “I am very attracted by bad taste – it is a lot more exciting than that supposed good taste, which is nothing more than a standardised way of looking at things.” This month, Taschen will publish an extensive Helmut Newton portfolio including some of the photographer’s most striking shots from the ’60s through to his golden heyday, a collection of his fashion, editorial and personal pictures.
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