I loved it so much as a child … the ambiance, and every little secret corner which I seemed to know,” Newton wrote in his autobiography. “Berlin had fascinated me from the moment I understood what a city meant. Newton retained an image of the Berlin of his youth in all its elegant grandeur, and cultivated these memories through his photographic work, which has always been deeply steeped in the character and mood of old Europe. It was from this cosmopolitan city that he fled Nazi persecution in 1938 and in which he was laid to rest next to Marlene Dietrich in the Städtischer Friedhof cemetery over sixty-five years later. Even if the female happens to be looking his way, her gaze is the only one that matters.īorn Helmut Neustädter in 1920 to a wealthy German-Jewish button-manufacturer and an American mother, Newton, as he would later call himself, remained at heart a Berliner throughout his life. Newton positioned his women – Catherine Deneuve, Elsa Peretti, Charlotte Rampling and Paloma Picasso were a few of his favourites – in tableaux of sharp, shiny edges or near shimmering pools, an Amazonian world in which any male that might happen to enter the frame became a voyeur, powerful in masculine bearing but somehow docile and non-threatening. Newton often said that the purpose of the photographer was “to seduce, amuse, and entertain,” and it was his genius to transform the erotic and make it the theatre of the surreal, in which the female is the unequivocal star, often laid bare but never objectified. To utter the name Helmut Newton is to evoke a black and white world of predatory, self-aware women more at home in the cabarets of Weimar Germany than the glossy pages of Vogue. Master of the Lens: Helmut Newton In Focus Among other honors, Newton received the German Kodak Award for Photographic Books, a Life Legend Award from Life magazine, and an award from the American Institute for Graphic Arts for his photographs.Archive, Art, Avant Art, Culture, Fashion, Feature, Glass Celebrates, Photography In 2003, he died in a car crash in Los Angeles, at 84 years old. He continued to travel later in life, dividing his time between his homes in Monte Carlo and Los Angeles. In Paris he began working for French Vogue, and later Playboy, Elle, and other publications during the 1950s and 1960s as his reputation grew, traveling frequently throughout the world on assignments. He later opened up a photography studio, and moved to Europe in the 1950s. He fled increasing Nazi oppression in Germany in 1938, shortly after Kristallnacht, and worked in Singapore and Australia during World War II, serving in the Australian army for several years. It is reputed that Newton first became enamored with the female nude as a photographic subject as a teenager, while working as an apprentice to theater photographer Yva in Berlin. He increasingly focused more on these images rather than fashion photography emphasizing the aggressive and incendiary in his works.īorn to a Jewish family in Berlin in 1920, Newton received his first camera at 12 years old, often neglecting his studies in school to pursue photography. editor-in-chief Anna Wintour once described his work as “synonymous with Vogue at its most glamorous and mythic.” Known for the dramatic lighting and the unconventional poses of his models in his photographs, Newton’s work has been characterized as obsessive and subversive, incorporating themes of sadomasochism, prostitution, violence, and a persistently-overt sexuality into the narratives of his images. Newton is considered to have imbued fashion photography with narrative depth, giving context to his subjects by creating stylized, dreamlike scenes. “If a photographer says he is not a voyeur, he is an idiot,” he once said. Photographer Helmut Newton is most famous for his work as a fashion photographer, frequently creating work for Vogue magazine, and for his provocative, studied photographs of nudes.
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