It’s impossible not to have mixed feelings about Helmut Newton. I don’t think he would have been satisfied with anything less. He may not have
Looking back, I wonder how I would have reacted had I seen Newton’s work as it appeared month after month in the pages of French Vogue rather than all at once in a book with damning opinions attached. Catching up with it later, issue by issue, I could appreciate the photographs in context and better understand why they mattered. Newton and Guy Bourdin, who often shared Paris Vogue’s prime real estate, were agents of change. They came along at a time when fashion photography’s acknowledged masters–Horst, Beaton, Parkinson, Avedon, Penn–had become the Establishment, an Old Guard that, while far from moribund, needed some serious shaking up. Newton was hardly a radical, but his work often was, and he and Bourdin weren’t afraid to follow their erotic fantasies and fetishes wherever they might lead. Together, they changed the course of fashion photography–freeing it from old conventions, teasing it mercilessly, feeling it up, freaking it out.
Helmut Newton, “Tv Murder, Hotel on the Croisette” (Cannes, 1975).
© THE HELMUT NEWTON ESTATE / MACONOCHIE PHOTOGRAPHY
Newton’s particular perversity was to stage his pictures in the most luxurious surroundings: grand hotel suites, old-money townhouses, private yachts, Riviera resorts, topiary gardens. By both playing into and subverting fashion’s long-standing fascination with the very rich, he gives his flirtation with pornography a distractingly expensive gloss. The work may be scandalous but it’s never tawdry. Brassaï, an acknowledged influence, haunts some of Newton’s settings, but there’s little of Brassaï’s bruised, shadowy intimacy here. Newton’s erotic charge is more jolting, although not without its subtleties and sly seductions. Newton’s humor, however barbed and wicked, is key to his appeal. He’s more than willing to make his audience uncomfortable, but he always wants to keep us entertained. He likes to put on a show, often by conjuring an imagined private world and exposing all its intrigues and secrets. His melodramas are nearly always comedies of restraint and excess, and far more amusing than arousing. I don’t think he really intended to turn anyone on; the work is too brittle, too brainy for that. But he didn’t want us to just turn the page.
Newton called himself a voyeur. He indulged that compulsion by any means necessary, and invited us to share it. I no longer see any reason not to. Newton may not be easy to like, but he can’t be dismissed. For some, he’ll always be a problem; he wouldn’t have it any other way.
Vogue Italia columnist Vince Aletti is a writer, curator and photography critic.