Helmut Newton is one of the most well known fashion photographers of his time because of the distinct style and the many iconic images that make up his portfolio. The central theme of all of his photographs is power. He photographed everything from grandiose scenes with dolled up women for Vogue to his series “Big Nudes”, full length nude portraits against a plan white background. And yet no matter what he was photographing he presents to us this fantastical women that appeals to our very being.
Born Helmut Neustradter on October 31st 1920, in Berlin Germany, to Jewish parents. His father was a German jew who ran a button factory and his mother was American. His parents always encouraged his art and when he was 12 years old he saved up to buy his first camera which was a cheap box camera and he shot a roll of film in the subway which completely failed. He kept up with it and eventually mastered using available and indirect light. At 16 he began assisting for Yva (Else Neulander Simon) a German jewish photographer. She shot mostly portraits and fashion photographs and there he started learning how to set up the lights for this type of shoot from her. Yva was eventually killed in a concentration camp. Newton would later describe how he “returns to Berlin in 1958, finds Yva's studio intact, unused and almost empty, save for some of her fashion prints, still on the wall... an inadvertent shrine that becomes symbolism and a marker for the Berlin of his youth.” (Russell 2003) For his parents the last straw was ‘Kristallnacht’’, the Night of Broken Glass, on November 9th 1938. They soon escaped to Chile, while Newton waited until December 5th 1938 to begin his journey from Italy to China aboard the Conte Rosso. A lay over in Singapore changed his journey. He ended up staying on as a reporter and portraitist for Straits Times, Singapore’s English daily newspaper. He continued to live and work there until British authorities escorted him aboard the Queen Mary to Sydney Australia, arriving on September 27th 1940. He was interned for a short time at Victoria as an enemy alien until 1942. He then spent a short time working as a fruit picker in the North and eventually enlisted in the Australian Army. When the war ended in 1945 he became a Australian citizen and in 1946 he changed his last name to Newton.
In 1948 he met a young actress named June Browne, when she came into his studio looking for a modeling work, they were married within the year. He once told her "Photography will always be my first love, but you will be my second." She was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1923. Her life passion was theatre and since there was already another Melbourne actress name June Brown, she changed her name to June Brunell. In 1956 she received the Erik Kuttner award for the best actress in theatre but in the early 1970’s she really began to focus on her photography. She learned a lot from assisting Newton while at his shoots. But her style, compared to her husbands, looks much more like snapshots. She mostly took portraits and did a little fashion photography.
In 1970 at a commercial photo shoot in Paris, she had to stand in for Helmut, who was terribly ill. Her career as a commercial photographer soon began under the pseudonym Alice Springs. She did advertisements for Jean-Louis David and editorial work for magazines such as Dépêche, Mode, Elle, Marie-Claire, Vogue, Nova, and Mode Internationale. She had her first solo exhibition in Amsterdam in 1978. By 1981 the couple had been spending their winters in California where Spring could work on her portraits of Hollywood actors and directors, as well as the Hell’s Angels. She published a french volume of portraits that was published in the US and Germany for some time as well. In 1995 she produced a documentary film called “Helmut by June” for a French television channel. And in 1998 a Swiss publication of both her and Helmut’s work called “Us and Them” came out, it was accompanied by an exhibition that toured around quite a few countries. In 2004, her autobiography was published and she opened the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin which featured “Us and Them.” (The Helmut Newton Foundation)
Newton first studio was on Flinders Lane in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia in 1946, there he shot mostly fashion photography. His first joint exhibition was in May 1953 with Wolfgang Sievers, a German refugee who had served in the same Army company as Newton. It was called “New Visions in Photography” and was shown in the Federal Hotel. Shortly after he began a partnership with Henry Talbot, a fellow German Jew, who had been interned in Tatura for some time. When Newton moved to London in 1957, Talbot stayed on and ran the studio under both their names.
Newton had done a piece for Vogue in a special Australian edition and this lead to him winning a twelve month contract with British Vogue. Unfortunately, he left the magazine before his year was out. Him and June finally settled in Paris in 1961, he had decided that the city of Paris was the place for him. There he was able to continue doing his fashion photography that was becoming so popular. He worked for French Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and just about any other fashion magazine that was being published at the time.
His work is highly stylized and elegant, with erotic undertones. He’s best known for his nudes as fashion photography. He always made his women look beautiful but it wasn’t until he had his first heart attack in 1970 that all of the women in his photographs became so powerful. After this heart attack he reassessed his life and his work and something changed. He decided it was more important to create photographs that he wanted then to create things that made others happy. Where he once took any commercial photography job that was offered to him just to make ends meat, now he decided that he would only shoot what he wanted, the way he wanted. He took huge chances and pushed boundaries that no one else had ever tried in main stream magazines.
Right after the heart attack he began shooting all of the women in his photographs with or wearing ornate prosthetic devices. He used these items to show the artificiality of these fashion spreads. Another theory was that he may have felt emasculated by the heart attack. One critic, Donald Kuspit, states “...these photographs also suggest the reason Newton unconsciously -- and not so unconsciously -- identified with woman: he felt castrated by the heart attack. It in effect changed him into a woman, that is, in his imagination he felt he had lost his potency. The prosthetic device -- like the high-heeled shoe and the cigar (both are also implicitly prosthetic replacements and substitutes for a missing body part) -- restored him to ironical manhood: the prosthesis was, symbolically, the penis he had lost to the trauma of the heart attack.” (Kuspit 2001) He used this artistic approach to try to correct and deal with the defect in his own body image. Viewing fashion as a type of esthetic prosthesis for these women and photography as his own prosthetic. It became a way to compensate for his lack of reality and low self esteem.
After the heart attack almost every accessory and ornament he used to style his photographs were phallic. Every women he shot wore very high-heeled shoes and many of the women were smoking cigars. From her jewelry, to dogs, guns, and even fur coats, the implications are always lurking. “The transformation of high fashion tableaux's into pure voyeurism where elegant women are suspended in erotic moments within exotic settings that leave their target lovers off-camera. These shots are always a prelude for other shots that remain unpublished except in our imaginations. Sometimes the women are waiting, clearly positioned for sex, anonymous exhibitionists in a private dreamscape... the baroque decadence of a European luxury hotel, a walled garden, the swimming pool of a private villa, a yacht in the Mediterranean, etc... sometimes the women are in transit, as if fleeing some debacle or rushing to join an orgy.” (Russell 2003) He posed them with automobiles, shovels and other tools to aggrandize her attitude and power. He cast only very stereotypically powerful looking models, with ideal female bodies. With the added phallic symbolism she becomes unstoppable with her real breast and symbolic penis. Men and women alike are drawn to these women and shunned by these women. He had a way of imploring this ideal by making these women seductive and highly desirable but incredibly detached and unmoved by the awe of any onlookers. As though these women are unable to or unwilling to love someone back regardless of the passion one feels for them. He uses perversion with an intentional amount of shock to illustrate all of this with a number of images involving homoerotic tendencies, some involving transvestism. He didn’t want people to misunderstand the themes and think it was about sex although his style is very sexual, it is just used as an instrument to gain power, power being the central theme.
Another important aspect of his work is his power as the photographer to create this illusion of power. To him the power of women lay within her artificiality, not her sexuality. “It’s the artificiality that announces that she is not really human, but rather the perfect machine, all the more so because it so perfectly mimics the human.” (Kuspit 2001) Newton thought that the photograph was perfect for women because like women “it seemed natural but it is completely artificial and constructed; both are deceptions -- stylized versions of a reality that may or may not exist. (Kuspit 2001)
Baron Adolf de Meyer invented staged fashion photography and is often referred to as the first fashion photographer, but Newton really made it what it has become today. He is one of the main innovator of fashion photography, perceiving it as a short story. Like a mini-drama where the model became the star and her clothes were just stage props, reversing the roles within fashion photography. Where as before the model was expected to be anonymous, characterless, the clothes were suppose to be the ones with the personality. He was writing and directing and capturing these narratives while everyone else took pictures, this really set him apart from the crowd. This was the first time that magazines were publishing images that left the consumers to interpret it on their own. Until then magazines had a very clean commercial look, very straight forward, and were clear in the message they were sending about the clothes, which were shown perfectly; well lit, pressed and pinned perfectly in place. He made fashion photography a little bit messier and dirtier then it had ever been before. The magazine pages he showed up on interacted with their viewers differently and on a much more personal level then anyone else's photographs had up to that point.
This is shown in Newton’s photograph “Madonna Dancing on Bar with Bottle” taken in 1990. She is portrayed posing on a bar wearing a cabaret dancers outfit with two men sitting below her. It’s a very industrial looking space with exposed beams on the ceiling and a big metal fan in the wall. Hanging on the wall are three mirrors, which are a favorite of Newton’s. You can’t make anything out in the reflection but it puts the image in the context of his work. You can only see the face and expression of one of the men sitting below her, the man sitting to her right. He is looking up at her with a clenched jaw and sunglasses, it’s an expression of desire and an inability to do anything about it. The other man is clutching a beer and is staring directly at her legs. Madonna wearing hot pants with fish nets, a bowler hat, and an open vest exposing a breast. She is posed on the bar like a tap dancer, with her knees bent and one foot in front of the other.
She has one hand on her front thigh and the other is beautifully holding onto the top of a cane, the phallic piece. It’s very long and skinny with a thin white high light running up the entire shaft. It’s placed right in between her and the man looking up at her, keeping him from her. Regardless of how narrow it is, it is preventing him from getting to her, he knows that if he were to try anything she has to power to put him in his place, using that cane. The power is there, no matter how small it may look. Her mouth is wide open and you can see just the tips of her iconic front teeth and between those and her unseen bottom teeth is a beer bottle, which would also be considered phallic. Her eyes are staring intently into the camera lens with a provocative look. She has the power, she is on the bar, she is entertaining them and she’s loving every moment of it.
The image has a powerful undertone because Madonna started out as a struggling dancer but by the time this image was taken was a super star and house hold name. It’s visual power is in her muscular body, the glimpse of washboard abs and part of a breast. As well as the power she holds over the men below her, she is of a higher statue, both physically and emotionally. It certainly held a good amount of power over a bidder at a Christie’s auction where it sold for $96,000 in 2005.
Unfortunately in 2004 while leaving the Chateau Marmont, where he had been living for several years, he crashed his car into a wall in the driveway. A parking attendant saw his body slump down moments before the crash and it is believed that he had a second heart attack leading up to the car accident. His ashes are buried in Berlin next to Marlene Dietrich.
Shortly before his death Newton established the Helmut Newton Foundation. It is registered in Zurich, Switzerland. In October 2003, the foundation entered into a formal agreement with the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation that enabled the Helmut Newton Foundation to have unlimited use of the ground and first floor in the former military casino in Berlin-Charlottenburg to be able to show exhibitions continuously. Newton didn’t want the foundation to be a “dead museum” it should be a “living institution.” Since he had equip the foundation with a huge number of his prints as well as a large body of Alice Spring’s work, the exhibitions have the ability to circulate. The foundations mission statements says “The Helmut Newton Foundation is an international foundation dedicated to the promotion, preservation and presentation of the photographic works of Helmut and June Newton, who under the name of Alice Springs has also produced a significant body of portraiture photography since 1970.” His widowed wife June Newton (Alice Springs), now 87 years old, is currently the head of the organization and and the editor for any publications of his work.
Newton made great strides in the art of fashion photography and opened many doors for photographers to come. He revolutionized the way the female body was viewed, very rarely before him was a nude female body showed in a powerful way. It was often looked down upon or very submissive. he was able to change that because he challenged taboos by forcing viewers to see established cultural traditions differently.
