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Writing in The Independent, J G Ballard called him
the greatest figurative artist working today. "I seriously believe,"
the novelist also told American Vogue, "that since the death of
Francis Bacon, one of the greatest visual artists alive today is
Helmut Newton."
Newton himself would no doubt view the comparison
between himself and Bacon with some suspicion. The photographer
has consistently refused to accept that his work is art. "In my
vocabulary, `art' is a dirty word," he has said. But a major exhibition
at the Barbican celebrating Newton's 80th birthday will elevate
the photographer to his rightful place at the forefront of modern
photography.
Because, love Helmut Newton or love to hate him,
it is impossible to deny the impact he has made, on fashion photography
in particular. During his career, Newton has created a whole world
around the humble garment. It is a world peopled by untouchable,
Amazonian women who live, sleep and breathe in immaculate make-up,
heavy jewellery and vicious stiletto heels. They are proud of their
European, bourgeois status and confident enough to cross the gender
divide effortlessly.
It is also a world where a sense of intrigue, darkness
and even crime is often present. In Newton's pictures, a woman dismembers
a roast chicken, a bloodied kitchen knife by her side, her grease-smeared
hands weighed down by huge sapphire rings and bracelets heavy with
diamonds the size of boiled sweets. His women wear rhinestone-encrusted
black evening dresses - studded leather collars optional - and that's
just to the beach. Silk stockings, corsetry and generously proffered
naked flesh are all part of the Newton aesthetic. So are mirrors,
zips and head-masks.
Small wonder, then, that when he first started making
waves, his aesthetic was branded "porno chic". To radical feminists,
Newton is the Antichrist. This is the man who photographed a woman
on all fours with a saddle on her back, and another sitting in her
underwear on an unmade bed, with a gun in her mouth. Ballard, who
has also incurred the wrath of feminists in the past, springs to
his defence: "It's just unfortunate that he has fallen foul of extreme
feminists or political correctness. Accusations of voyeurism and
so forth have distracted people from realizing just how important
an artist he is."
Newton's vision is fuelled by sex, status, power
and, above all, voyeurism - there are often extras in his pictures
who gaze at the women centre-stage. Those are, of course, also the
things that make fashion tick. Small wonder, then, that much of
the photographer's most successful imagery has become far more famous
than the garments he has chosen to photograph.
Take Yves Saint Laurent's Le Smoking. When, in 1966,
Saint Laurent sent out a model in a man's suit, with the aim of
freeing women from the trappings of feminine, frilly dresses, he
caused an almighty scandal. But it was Newton's interpretation of
it, lit by street- lamps in a Parisian back-alley, that people remember.
Newton's influence is everywhere. Mario Testino's
breakthrough advertising campaign for Gucci in 1996 - featuring
lovely young things lying about with glazed expressions, in psychedelic
clothing, their slender white limbs intertwined - owed more than
a little to Newton. The photographer shot an editorial cutely entitled
"What to Stay In In" for Queen magazine as long ago as 1965, which
is remarkably similar in spirit.
Newton was photographing dodgy underwear, flock
wallpaper and even underarm hair for Nova in the 1970s, some 20
years before Corinne Day photographed a young Kate Moss in her underwear
at her none-too-glamorous flat, and Juergen Teller shot Annie Morton
as a full-frontal nude on a Dralon sofa, making "real life" photography
famous. And infamous. In the Sixties and Seventies, Newton's decadent
vision may have been labelled "porno chic", but today the rest of
the world has finally caught up with him and it's just plain chic.
There is barely a stylist, photographer or designer
working in fashion today who can fail to acknowledge Newton as an
influence - from the brainless shoots of glossy, scantily clad B-
list celebrities in men's magazines such as Loaded and FHM, which
probably make Newton himself wince in pain, to the inspired work
of Katie Grand, editor of Pop magazine and fashion director of The
Face.
"Helmut Newton is the best photographer ever," says
Grand, never a woman to hedge her bets. "Because I work in fashion
and am surrounded by those who are informed by his work, it's hard
for me to tell whether people in general are offended by him anymore,
but I doubt it. I mean, everyone's been so educated by those images."
The designer Alexander McQueen says that he, too,
owes more than a little to the great man's work. "Newton photographed
one of the dresses from my Dante collection in 1996," he says. The
collection was shown in a Gothic church in Spitalfields, east London,
and offered an early glimpse of the sophistication that has made
McQueen such a huge name in the fashion world. "He picked a black
lace dress, worn in the show by Stella Tenant,"McQueen recalls.
"It went right up over her face, covering it, like a hangman's hood.
Newton said he liked the contrast between the fragility of the lace
and the brutality of the act of enshrouding a woman's face with
it."
It is not insignificant that, while most people
choose to shoot McQueen's more obviously commercial garments - a
wicked trouser suit, say, or an embroidered sheath dress -Newton
selected one of the more challenging pieces. It was also an outfit
that was far more true to McQueen's macabre sensibility. Newton's
choice of McQueen as the designer to introduce him at the Barbican
is clearly an inspired one. It is testimony to the photographer's
genius that, despite their difference in age -Newton is 80, McQueen
only 32 - they have a lot in common.
Both are preoccupied with the fine line between
beauty and cruelty, fragility and brutality; both see gender as
something fluid, to be experimented with. Most important, here are
two people who push against the boundaries of what is and isn't
acceptable, as if their very existence depended on it. In this,
they are the ultimate agents provocateurs, daring their audience
to rise to the challenge they present in their work, to engage in
a darker and more complex side of humanity.
Helmut Newton was born to middle-class Jewish parents
in Weimar Berlin in 1920, and the decadent spirit of that place
at that time is imprinted on his work. He bought his first camera
when he was 12, shooting his first film in the Berlin Metro. By
his mid-teens, he was photographing his girlfriends in his mother's
clothes, until, aged 16, he learnt to use a camera professionally,
as apprentice to Else Simon, a society photographer who worked under
the alias of Yva. She died later in Auschwitz.
Newton and his parents fled Berlin in 1938. His
mother and father went to South America; Helmut headed for Singapore,
where he took a job as press photographer for the Singapore Straits
Times. In 1940, he moved to Australia, where he met his future wife,
June, in 1947. He married her a year later, and the two remain inseparable
to this day. She is also a photographer; she famously photographed
her husband in stilettos and collaborates with him, curating exhibitions
and art-directing books of his work.
In 1956, Newton left Melbourne, where he had set
up his studio and was working for the newly launched Australian
Vogue, and moved to London, where he had been given a contract with
the more established and prestigious British edition of the magazine.
He soon became bored of shooting still lifes of accessories for
the magazine's prosaic "Shop Hound" section and finally quit the
title when required to turn his attention to "Mrs Exeter", featuring,
as he put it, "outfits for the more mature woman, with a blue-haired
lady modelling the fashion".
By the early Sixties, Newton was in Paris and beginning
to shoot his most influential work, this time for French Vogue.
In the 20 years that followed, he produced his most accomplished
portfolio. By the Eighties, Helmut Newton had tired of fashion and
set to photographing nudes. Big Nudes, a series of huge portraits
of glossy, larger-than-life women wearing nothing but stilettos,
and shot against a white backdrop, was one of the more remarkable
projects of that time. He also turned his hand to portraiture, photographing,
among others, Claus Von Bulow and Salvador Dali for Vanity Fair,
until, in 1998, he finally turned his cold and uncompromising eye
toward himself.
Us and Them was a joint show and book featuring
his own work and that of his wife; it was filled with intimate snapshots
of themselves nude and even sick in hospital beds. On the eve of
the exhibition, Newton said: "I find it almost too intimate. We
show too much of our life. Maybe it's better that the people don't
know too much about you. It's more controlled." In the end, perhaps
the most remarkable thing about Newton is that, despite his now
being accepted and, for the most part, revered by the establishment,
he continues to provoke.
In 1994, Bulgari, the jewellery designers, threatened
to withdraw its advertising from French Vogue when it published
a shoot featuring a model dismembering a chicken while wearing its
exclusive, fine jewellery. Bulgari changed its mind not long afterward,
safe in the knowledge that, thanks to the photographer, its designs
were enjoying something of a renaissance at fashion's cutting edge.
Accusations of misogyny are still constantly made
against Newton's work. In a world where images of prepubescent girls,
and women as limp and vulnerable, proliferate, that seems surprising.
We have survived the girlish waif of the Sixties, the superwaif
of the Nineties andAeven heroin chic but, despite that, Newton can
still always be relied on to whip up a storm. He claims to love
women; he says that the women he portrays are strong, never victims.
"I think it's because Helmut Newton has dealt with
issues long before anyone else had the nerve to," McQueen says;
"issues that people don't really want to address -such as sexuality."
And does that make him politically incorrect? "I don't think he
is," says the designer, adding: "Well, maybe he is in suburbia,
you know, with the Margots and Gerrys of this world."
Helmut Newton: Work at Barbican Gallery
Open 10 May – 8 July 2001
An opportunity to see both classic Helmut Newton images and works
never seen before. Through his uncompromising photographs Newton
allows us a tantalising glimpse into the world of extreme sophistication
and flaunted wealth. This exhibition is a chance to gain insight
to one of the most controversial and challenging image-makers to
have influenced our perception of beauty, fame and glamour.
Pictured above:
Fat Hand with Dollars, Monte Carlo, 1986
The Best of Helmut Newton, available at amazon.co.uk priced £21.84
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