Helmut newton girl with a gun10/7/2023 All this fine-art crap is killing it already.' And yet, the strictly formalised nature of his best images meant he was more often compared to Surrealist painters than to other photographers. I'm a gun for hire.' Later, he told an interviewer: 'Art is a dirty word in photography. 'Some people's photography is an art,' he once said. Newton, however, never made any great claimson behalf of his work. The great fashion photographers would never work like that they need to take risks, to push the boundaries, and Helmut was always pushing the boundaries.' 'Many fashion photographers today are just illustrators, who illustrate someone else's ideas. 'Like all truly great photographers, he sometimes took bad pictures,' attests David Bailey, who knew and admired Newton. It seems no accident that he ended up living in Monte Carlo, that semi-mythical haunt of playboys and gamblers. Sometimes, though, there is something oddly old-fashioned about Newton's fashion-fantasy world, something a bit James Bond, and, sometimes, even a bit Milk Tray. 'It's the worst thing that can happen to a creative person.'Īnd yet, for all his provocation, his photographs were seldom vulgar. 'I hate good taste,' he once famously remarked. Newton was a photographer who never saw the point of not overstating the obvious: in one infamous shoot, he placed a horse's saddle on a beauty posing in riding jodhpurs on a bed on all fours in another the women sported medical corsets and braces as Cronenbergian sexual accessories. Right up until his sudden death last year, aged 82 - his car slamming into a wall on Sunset Boulevard after he suffered a heart attack while leaving the Chateau Marmont Hotel - he specialised in a kind of obsessively stylised sexual voyeurism that he constantly refined, but never diluted. ![]() For nigh-on 40 years after he outraged his employer at Queen, Newton remained the undisputed king of kinkiness. Way back before the likes of Terry Richardson blurred the lines between fashion and hardcore pornography, making explicit the link between the two, Helmut Newton was doing a similar kind of thing for soft porn, albeit in a more stage-managed and highly symbolic way. Until, that is, you realise how far ahead of his time the cavalier snapper was in his depiction of style as an expression of ritualised sexuality, and fashion as a fetishistic pursuit. Looking now at the cream of Newton's fashion photography, collected in a new book by his widow, June, and called, with typical Newtonian candour, A Gun for Hire, it is difficult to see what all the fuss was about. 'One never knows the reaction pictures will provoke among the higher echelons at magazines,' writes Newton dryly, his Germanic poise as unruffled then as it was in the decades that followed, when his consistently sexual provocations constantly made him the photographer that feminists loved to hate. Working and living in close companionship with his wife until his death at 83, his images remain as distinctive, seductive and orginal as ever.So incensed was Stevens that he tore a telephone out of the wall and hurled it through the window. In 1996, he was appointed "Commandeur de l'Ordre ""des Arts et des Lettres" by Philippe Douste-Blazy, the French Minister of Culture at the time. In 1990 he was awarded the "Grand Prix national de la photographie" in 1992 the German government awarded him "Das Grosse ""Verdienstkreuz" for services to German culture, and he was appointed "Officier ""des Arts, Lettres et Sciences" by S.A.S. Controversial scenarios, bold lighting, and striking compositions came to form his signature look. Newton preferred to shoot in streets or interiors, rather than studios. He first achieved international fame in the 1970's while working principally for "French""Vogue," and his celebrity and influence grew over the decades. ![]() Born in Berlin, he arrived in Australia in 1940 and married June Brunell (a.k.a. Helmut Newton (1920-2004) was one of the most influential photographers of all time.
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