Photography / A PROFESSIONAL VOYEUR

36 A PROFESSIONAL VOYEUR

by Keith Francis

In these times of collective virtue-signalling navel-gazing quasihysteria, as always Benedikt Taschen comes to our rescue, fearlessly publishing a volume crammed full of images to remind us that nudity, complicity, voyeurism and exhibitionism are all essential ingredients of happiness. Naturally, for anyone not scandalised by a bit of bare flesh…

Helmut Neustädter was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Berlin in 1920, and fell in love with photography at a tender age. Having saved to buy himself a box brownie, he intuitively began photographing the things that fascinated him the most, like the Berlin Funkturm, glistening symbol of an emerging modern age and a motif to which he would return, as well as experimenting with night photography, once shooting a whole roll of film in the Berlin metro. None of the photos came out, but he’d discovered you can take photos in the dark. Coming of age in Berlin, one of the most avantgarde cities of the time, young Helmut developed in a culture overripe with pleasure, provocation, and decadence.

But dark forces were on the rise in Germany. After the infamous Kristallnacht in 1938, realising the city was no longer safe, Helmut packed a suitcase, grabbed two cameras and fled. His teacher, a Jewish lady he’d been very close to, stayed and was later taken to a concentration camp and killed, a fate he himself would certainly have met, had he not left. Via Singapore he eventually reached Australia where he anglicised his name, and met his wife June, a model who’d come to pose and fell in love with his work.

He soon established himself as a fashion photographer, and landed a contract to shoot for British Vogue. In Europe again, Helmut’s radical aesthetics proved better suited to Parisian tastes. After landing a contract with French Vogue, in 1961 the couple arrived in Paris, where Helmut finally received proper recognition for his work, which drew very much from his early years in the Weimar Republic grafted into controversial, hypersexualised imagery linked with the themes of surrealism - the dominant art movement in Berlin during his youth. Newton’s obsessions became power and sex. Sex and power, how sex makes you powerful. Funny he photographed Margaret Thatcher... but his style really does capture the coldness, the calculation of that particular iron lady. He loved powerful women, and is even said to have fantasized about photographing Camilla Parker Bowles (big nude? The mind boggles…). Helmut Newton was a both an active witness and an influencer of fashion across time. Pushing artistic boundaries he influenced fashion and so society itself, entering forever into the collective imagination thanks to the sheer number of pictures taken over fifty years in virtually every country in the world, creating one of the most published bodies of work in the history of photography.

Taschen’s Helmut Newton - Legacy showcases highlights and rediscovered images from this unprecedented body, celebrating Newton’s lasting influence on visual art to this day.

Heather looking through a keyhole

Paris 1994

© Helmut Newton Foundation, Berlin

EXHIBITION Helmut Newton Foundation Jebensstraße 2, 10623 Berlin open until May 22, 2022 helmut-newton-foundation.org

BOOK taschen.com

Helmut Newton. Legacy

Helmut Newton, Matthias Harder, Philippe Garner Hardcover 24 x 34 cm, 3,04 kg, 424 pages € 80

Carla Bruni, Bluemarine, Nice 1993

© Helmut Newton Foundation, Berlin

Cindy Crawford - American Vogue

Monte Carlo 1991

© Helmut Newton Foundation, Berlin

37

Thierry Mugler - American Vogue, Monte Carlo 1995 © Helmut Newton Foundation, Berlin