PHOTO:Helmut Newton
Helmut Neustädter (Helmut Newton) was born 31/10/1920 in Berlin and he passed away in Hollywood in 23/1/2004 because of a heart attack in his new car in the age of 84. He attended the Werner Von Trotschke Gymnasium and the American School. He was interested in photography from the age of 12 and worked with the popular fashion and portrait photographer Elsie Simon, known as Yva, form 1936.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Helmut Newton Foundation Archive
Because of the race laws he left Germany in 1938 and he took refuge in Singapore where he worked as photographer for the Straits Times. In 1948 he married the Australian actress June Browne, known as Alice Springs. After the war he became a freelance fashion photographer. He moved to Paris in 1961. His images were published in a lot of magazines: Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, GQ, Vanity Fair and Marie Claire. Newton has always been very much more than a fashion photographer, he has fundamentally changed the terms of the fashion image. His aesthetic was branded ‘porno chic’. To radical feminists, Helmut Newton was the antichrist, his work outraged many and they protested one of his exhibits by throwing paint on his photos. “In my vocabulary, ART is a dirty word”, he said, but it can be assumed that the spirit of Helmut Newton’s work has sympathised with the movement of the surrealists, while Sousan Soltang argues that his iconography derives from the celebrations of the Nazis. He portraited amazonian women who live, sleep and breathe in immaculate make-up, heavy jewellery and stiletto heels, gorgeous women, expensive gowns, and exotic locations, to create a unique imaginative world, in luxurious villas or near windows in the magic of the metropolis. He adored luxury and wealth and reflected it in all its work. But he was the first to alter the woman from a standard eroticism in a sexual object and photographed her, with an insatiable hunger to end… Newton uses elements of disguised sexual violence and eroticism, arousing male fantasy to the fullest, since he knows very well to handle gameof the image and to balance exactly on the boundary. Intensely sensual shapely bodies, with darkened look, well-painted lips intensely, full of passion and mystery displayed in the foreground, mostly in black and white, with all kinds of sexually lethal weapons that stir every man’s mind, creating desires… wet dreams and fantasies…
