Helmut Newton's work continues to be as distinctive and influential as ever. It opened shortly after his death to much critical acclaim and is one of the most visited photographic museums in Europe. Just before his death he founded the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin with June. Living in France from 1960, then Monaco from 1980, he wintered for over thirty years with his wife June (the portrait photographer Alice Springs) in Los Angeles where he died following a heart attack in 2004. He was inspired by the German documentary photographer Erich Salomon, by Brassaï with whom he established a friendship and by Aleksander Rodchenko. She lives on the street, in a motor car, in a hotel room".
The majority of Newton's work was shot in the streets or in interiors he always said "A woman does not live in front of white paper. His portraits of the beautiful, the rich, the famous and infamous have amplified his ever-so-real fantasy world. Most striking was his ability to make a thoroughly planned photograph seem fresh and dynamic. Much of his inspiration derived from the daily newspapers, real life situations or paparazzi shots. Known for the precise glamour of his photographs as well as the striking, often controversial scenarios he chooses for his models. (Christopher Benfy, 'Flashback: Helmut Newton's famous 1975 photograph.the story behind the picture, New York Times Magazine, Part 2, Spring 1998.Born in Berlin in 1920, Helmut Newton achieved international fame as a fashion photographer in the 1970s while working principally for French Vogue. Pornography - where everything is allowed - is boring. To have taboos, then to get around them - that's interesting. What I find interesting is working in a society with certain taboos - and fashion photography is about that kind of society. Ideally, they look like something that really happened a photographer just came along and snapped the picture. My pictures are very worked, but they mustn't look labored.
You don't know it's going to mean anything. When you make a picture, you think, this is a nice one. And I don't use a flash I use the actual street lighting. With haute couture collections, you couldn't get the clothes during the day when customers were looking at them. The idea was a man-woman standing in the street at night - the street, in fact, in Paris' Marais district, where I lived for 14 years. 'Vibeke was a girl I often worked with in those days. In an 1998 article for the New York Times Magazine, which was devoted solely to the making of these two photographs, Helmut Newton was asked for his recollections of this very singular assignment for Yves Saint Laurent. This photograph, first published in French Vogue in 1975 is one of those.' We are being invited to imagine that the two women are one and the same - dandy and streetwalker - undressed in the eye of the hidden paparazzo, Helmut Newton himself.įrom time to time, a fashion photograph - that particularly restrictive genre that unites a time, a place, a dress, a face - rises to the level of art and miraculously survives the vicissitudes of taste. A slight shift in posture of the clothed woman reveals two things previously obscured: her high heels and her painted nails, which match those of the nude. As though to repair the omission, Newton took a second photograph - the same model, same suit, but a nude model in high heels has approached the suited figure and caresses her shoulder and arm. The photograph is unusual in Newton's corpus in that the woman is fully clothed, her long legs and pinstripes echoing all the other strong verticals in the picture. The woman in the photograph evokes a familiar figure from 19th century French art, the cold-eyed (and always male) dandy who, in Baudelaire's famous formulation, has 'no profession other than elegance'. Helmut Newton's camera has captured an intensely private moment, the figure's inner calm is a marked contrast to the rakish cut of her suit. 'A woman stands alone in a city street at night.
0 kommentar(er)
