Newton Bourdin Avedon
Helmut Newton (1920-2004) loved to repeat his father’s admonition that he would end up in the gutter because his young mind was so singularly focused on girls and photographs. Instead, the feckless, unscholarly boy grew up to transform fashion photography and glory in the rarefied jet-set lifestyle he documented on the pages of glossy magazines. Probably the most imitated (and controversial) fashion photographer of his time, Newton earned the nickname King of Kink—as well as a fortune. “If a photographer says he is not a voyeur, he is an idiot,” Newton once said. His erotic and dreamlike images were like a peep through a keyhole, spied moments of a heightened reality. As a person, Newton was—unsurprisingly— complex. A bohemian and yet very pragmatic, he insisted that he was not an intellectual and did not stand for much. His sardonic humor, delight in mischief, and nonchalant sense of irony are obvious in his work. He considered America weird, exotic, and outrageous; the suburbs, funny; and claimed to carry a monocle, a cigarette holder, and a pair of false nipples in his camera bag at all times. Though a slave to his own imagination, Newton
claimed that his photographs were entirely based in reality. “There’s not one photo, including the one I did of a woman pushing another woman down the toilet, which isn’t based on truth,” he said in 1994. He was inspired by film noir, Expressionist cinema, S & M, and Surrealism in equal measure; his many obsessions were rooted in his childhood in the decadent, avantgarde capital that was prewar Berlin. Spoiled when he was growing up, he traveled with his parents to many of Europe’s grandest hotels, where he spent hours splashing in pools (later becoming a champion swimmer). In 1930s Germany, adolescent boys were told that excessive masturbation produced dark circles under the eyes; decades later, he would tell the makeup artists at his shoots to either keep the “masturbation rings” or add some. His use of uniforms and prosthetic devices, particularly the neck braces known as Minervas, can be traced back to propaganda films from the Weimar Republic and the actor and director Erich von Stroheim. As a photographer, Newton moved fashion tableaux from Norman Parkinson’s staid and still illustrations of the season’s styles to a very radical and racy reflection of the zeitgeist. “The 1960s and seventies
“If a photographer says he is not a voyeur, he is an idiot”
H eH l me ul tmHelmut ut
was a most creative time for fashion photography,” he would later write. “We didn’t need money to produce our photographs.” Instead of decorous compositions of, say, autumn leaves, Harris tweeds, and white ladies’ gloves, he ushered into Vogue the realms of cocaine, Patty Hearst, lesbians, bondage, sadomasochism, voyeurism, murder, pornography, prostitution, and threesomes. Though Newton’s models and their provocative poses were a direct reflection of the sexual revolution of that liberated era, his neo-noir settings reflected a leap backward in time— and, as a result, in the words of Karl Lagerfeld, “his pictures have survived better than the fashion they were meant to represent or illustrate.” Feminist critics often condemned Newton’s suggestive and risqué work—much to his delight— but the women in his photographs do not in general appear to be victims; more often, they are the powerful and manipulative perpetrators of some dark crime. The immaculate, Amazonian, and assertive figures in his multilayered mise-en-scènes take the lead rather than follow, and indeed seem capable of dominating the Masters of the Universe, both mentally and physically.
Unlike many of his colleagues, Newton preferred to work with lesser-known models and hated surgically amplified breasts. “He’d always say, ‘Don’t send me any of your scrawny, undernourished models,’ ” Vogue’s Phyllis Posnick remembered. Newton insisted, “I am not looking for a perfect body, whatever that means, because I find that boring.” Still, his subjects—tall and Teutonic, blonde and beautiful, confident and cruel—consistently achieved a glossy perfection. Though they are often naked and surrounded by the accoutrements of sexual desire, they remain immune to seduction and are never consumed by passion. Posing insolently in richly ornamented chairs or reclining with spread legs, his haughty, high-society belles convey a blasé aristocratic demeanor, untouched by their surroundings and their circumstances. Sinister props (a pistol, handcuffs, medical corset, wheelchair, or dog collar) mingle with status objects (stilettos, dark lipstick, furs, an Hermès saddle, a chauffeur and his limousine), giving the erotically charged scenes a sense of palpable menace. Newton avoided working in studios, preferring to arrange his set-pieces in the lushly appointed and darkened rooms of turn-of-the-century mansions or
“Shrinking-violet women really give me the creeps”
t Helmut Hel
Helmu mut
hotels, or in the half-decayed gardens of elegant villas. Instead of the measured light of a controlled studio, he preferred either the harsh glare of the midday sun or nocturnal shots, illuminated by headlights or a lone street lamp. In Helmut by June, an hour-long documentary by his wife, the photographer confessed, “Shrinkingviolet women really give me the creeps.” Fortunately, the love of Newton’s life—his source of inspiration, frequent model, editor, confidante, curator, and art director—was a zesty agent provocateur who urged him to push boundaries even further. Newton called his wife “Junie” or “powers that be”; she called him “Helmie” or “Helmut the Hermit.” The gregarious, complicit, and deeply loving duo never lost their spontaneity or sense of fun. Childless, the constant couple initiated family dinners with friends at the best restaurants around the world—Mr. Chow in New York or Los Angeles, Dave or Fouquet’s in Paris, and the Café de Paris in Monte Carlo. June later said that her husband “broke the taboos. I could name quite a few [photographers] who couldn’t be working in the way they are working, as freely and as liberated, if it hadn’t been for Helmut.” And, indeed, Helmut the Hermit’s techniques can be seen in the work of a generation: Ellen von Unwerth, Deborah Turbeville, David Bailey, Mario Testino, Steven Klein, and the late Herb Ritts. His aesthetic had an impact on
Hel
film directors, too, including Stanley Kubrick, Brian De Palma, and Roman Polanski. And, of course, his sensibility has also influenced designers, including, notably, Yves Saint Laurent, Helmut Lang, and Tom Ford. (The Lucite jewelry in Ford’s fall 2003 collection, for instance, was based on his memory of Newton’s late-seventies series of naked women in orthopedic body braces.) less Helmut Newton once wrote to a friend that photographers, like well-behaved children, should be seen and not heard. Fortunately for posterity, his photographs speak volumes.
Helmut mut
“There’s not one photo, including the one I did of a woman pushing another woman down the toilet, which isn’t based on truth”
In the glossy pulp-crime world conjured by the late Guy Bourdin (1928-1991), women are handcuffed, hung, drowned, tied to train tracks, and crushed by sedans. They are anonymous and indistinct victims, their heads and faces often cropped off the page—their only identifiers being the beautiful clothes and, especially, the shoes they leave behind. With his unmistakable signature look—“the decked-out ingenue with a touch of morbid fantasy,” as The New Yorker described it— Bourdin became one of the most influential and mythic fashion photographers of the twentieth century. Bourdin was best known for his editorial work for French Vogue and his ads for Charles Jourdan, the shoemaker, in the seventies. Like his contemporaries Helmut Newton and Deborah Turbeville, he was credited with revolutionizing the fashion photography of the era by doing away with the charming, upbeat, product-oriented shots of the 1950s and sixties and instead creating eerily suggestive pictorials in which the merchandise was implicated in vivid, unsettling narratives. As one art critic wrote, quite shockingly, of Bourdin’s lurid and dystopian fantasies, “It was fashion
at the brink: clothes to be raped in, shoes to be found dead in, a scarf to be strangled by.” Bourdin’s tabloid tableaux were highly staged fictions in which the models (when their faces were visible) sported vibrant, lacquered maquillage and either lifeless or snarling expressions. He played with the inherent falsity of the fashion image, exaggerating its artifice even further with shiny surfaces, models arrayed in graphic poses, and Surrealist-inspired juxtapositions (he was an admirer of Man Ray and Magritte). But while Bourdin’s creations were self-consciously fake, they mirrored the macabre psychodramas of his own life. Serge Lutens, his onetime creative stylist, summed up his work thus: “What Guy did was conduct his own psychoanalysis in Vogue.” Bourdin was a notoriously dark and eccentric figure. Born in Paris in 1928, he was soon abandoned by his mother, and his father sent him to live with his paternal grandmother in Normandy and Paris. Some claim Bourdin saw his mother—a pale, elegant redhead—only once. His half-brother, Michel, later recounted, “Guy never forgave his mother for letting him down. He was hard with women.” In his photos, he re-created the
“It was fashion at the brink: clothes to be raped in, shoes to be found dead in, a scarf to be strangled by.”
G u yG uGyu y
same redheaded archetype again and again, shooting in claustrophobic spaces—cramped, seedy hotel rooms and bathrooms—as well as desolate landscapes. The New York Times Magazine noted in 2003 that “abandonment became a personal and professional leitmotif. How often in his pictures do the models float in stark isolation?” After serving as an aerial photographer in the French Air Force in Dakar, Senegal, Bourdin continued photographing commercially while also pursuing a drawing and painting career. In 1954, he brought his work to French Vogue and was immediately given an assignment. One of his early photos for the magazine featured a model posing in a Claude Saint-Cyr saucer chapeau beneath a row of butchers’ skinned calves’ heads with dangling tongues. The image combined couture elegance with a bit of Surrealist grotesquerie, and hinted at the direction Bourdin would take in the years to come. By 1958, he had already hit upon his most famous trademark in the pages of American Vogue—in a shot of a pale redhead in profile, blood-red cherries seemingly spilling from her lips. Bourdin’s autocratic and eccentric ways soon became the stuff of industry legend. He demanded— and was granted—unprecedented editorial control over
his work. Rather than presenting French Vogue with a range of shots for each assignment, “Guy brought us one photo—only the one,” said Francine Crescent, who was editor in chief of the magazine and Bourdin’s champion during the height of his career. He often tried to bend nature to his will. Grace Coddington, who occasionally collaborated with Bourdin at British Vogue, recalled how he tried to dye the ocean a bluer blue for one shoot in the 1970s—which inevitably failed, costing the magazine a tidy sum. He subjected his models to elaborately jerry-rigged setups and perilous poses. For French Vogue’s Christmas 1970 issue, he had two models’ bodies covered with black pearls; they soon passed out because their skin couldn’t breathe through the glue. Another model described how Bourdin wanted to photograph her with a dog biting her skirt: “He sewed meat all around, which made the dog go crazy—it was biting my leg.” Many were thrilled for the chance to work with him; those who weren’t called him sadistic. As for his lovers, Bourdin was known to keep them virtually penned in, with little access to the outside world, until they broke down. His first wife, Solange Gèze—whom he married in 1961 but later deserted along with their
“Guy never forgave his mother for letting him down. He was hard with women.”
Guy
Guy
son, Samuel—died suddenly in 1969, a likely suicide. (Allegedly, Bourdin reenacted her death for a spring 1975 Charles Jourdan ad, depicting a lifeless woman on a bed shod in orange wedge sandals, a young boy passing by in a doorway.) One girlfriend slashed her wrists but survived. Yet another companion hung herself in 1981. The New Yorker would observe that Bourdin “felt that death, like carnal desire, could be transmuted into an imaginative resource.” Toward the late 1980s, Bourdin’s work began to fall out of favor, and he was plagued by financial troubles. Increasingly reclusive and ailing, he began to fade from
public consciousness. He adamantly refused any and all offers to sell, publish, or exhibit his work, and by the time he died in 1991 of cancer, he had become so obscure that his New York Times obituary misstated his name and age. And yet the dark humor and arresting beauty of his vision have been rediscovered and resurrected by subsequent generations of image-makers, from photographers such as Nick Knight, Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, and Steven Meisel to pop icons such as Robert Palmer and Madonna. As the noted critic Luc Sante wrote in 2003, “For Bourdin, beauty never appeared without its accomplices death, filth, and laughter.”
Guy G u y
“For Bourdin, beauty never appeared without its accomplices death, filth, and laughter.�
Photographer as auteur” was how Vanity Fair described the late Richard Avedon (1923-2004) in 2009. And, indeed, one of the most famous chroniclers of the twentieth century brought such a distinctly personal vision to his portfolios and portraits that he did no less than remake the landscape of postwar fashion photography. Avedon poured his own nervous energy into his images, coaxing and controlling his subjects to conjure the magically heightened moments he sought. A writer once dubbed him “Svengali as Santa Claus”: He danced along with his models in the studio to create beautifully kinetic fashion shots; he conducted portrait sessions of such psychological intensity—standing next to his 8 x 10 view camera, meeting his subject’s gaze—that one sitter said, “He sucks your soul out through your eye sockets, and leaves you utterly drained.” The force of Avedon’s personality is so strongly discernible in his most potent frames—from the majestically elegant lines of 1955’s Dovima With Elephants to the erotically charged image of Natassja Kinski with a slithering serpent—that Avedon himself confessed: “Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me.”
Avedon was born in 1923 in New York City to Russian-Jewish immigrants who struggled to make ends meet after their women’s department store failed during the Depression. He flunked out of high school, then joined the Merchant Marine, where he was assigned to taking ID photos—an experience that would color his future approach to portraiture. (“Faces are the ledgers of our experience,” he would say.) In 1944, freshly discharged from the service and enamored of the work of the legendary, chainsmoking art director Alexey Brodovitch at Harper’s Bazaar, Avedon turned up at the magazine’s offices carrying his amateur portfolio and begging for an appointment. He was hired as a staff photographer for the Junior Bazaar section. From the beginning, he brought both motion and emotion to his assignments. His work had a candid, spontaneous quality—with variable focus and streaks of movement (The New Yorker would later call it the “Avedon blur”) that set them apart from the regally composed but static shots then dominant. “Real people move, they bear with them the element of time,” Avedon said in 1949. “It is this fourth dimension of people that I try to capture in a photograph.”
“Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me.”
Richar Richard
He also added psychological subtext. Growing up, he had observed the women in his own family scrutinizing themselves in the mirror with a mixture of angst and pleasure, and he tried to capture on his models’ faces the nuanced emotions behind the act of dressing up. His subtly charged photos, however, did not always sit well with Carmel Snow, then editor of Bazaar. For a 1949 feature on chapeaus, Avedon submitted shots of the model Dorian Leigh on a train, caught in a tearful reverie. Snow’s rather tart reply: “Nobody cries in a Dior hat, Dick.” In subsequent years—with the patronage of Snow, Brodovitch, and fashion editor Diana Vreeland (a trifecta he referred to as “my new, chosen mother, father, and brilliant crazy aunt”)—Avedon threaded America’s seismic cultural shifts into his pictorials. He began portraying African-Americans in the 1940s, defying the policy of William Randolph Hearst, Bazaar’s publisher, banning photos of blacks from his magazines. As the space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union escalated in 1959, he posed Dovima—in a strong, wide-legged, A-line stance, hands defiantly on hips—against an Atlas missile at Cape Canaveral.
And, sensing the imminent explosion of a sexual revolution, Avedon shot a nude portrait of Countess Christina Paolozzi for Bazaar in 1961. Avedon was simultaneously developing a signature portrait style that was the stark foil to his dazzling fashion imagery: black-and-white, almost confrontational close-ups against blank backgrounds that registered the flaws of their famous subjects’ faces with the strippedbare quality of clinical dissection. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor were captured in a 1957 portrait that, as one observer put it, “made her look like a toad.” Marilyn Monroe, eyes downcast and shoulders slumped in a 1957 session, seemed utterly defeated by the business of being Marilyn Monroe. And the writer Isak Dinesen, photographed in 1958 in a sweeping black bearskin and skullcap, looked grotesquely embalmed. Rather than exalting his sitters in the classic portraiture tradition, Avedon conducted what the critic Geoff Dyer called a “visual interrogation“ to capture the vital character—the battle scars, the doubt and anxiety—that made a person great. Avedon was enticed to move over to Vogue in 1965 after Diana Vreeland—who had been named
“It is this fourth dimension of people that I try to capture in a photograph.”
R i c h a r d Richard rd
editor in chief three years before—dangled a plum contract and a million-dollar advance. It was at Vogue that he would develop one of his most recognizable trademarks: the exuberant model leaping, kicking, and twirling in midair. Under his direction, models such as Twiggy and Penelope Tree brought a sense of childlike play to Vogue’s pages—and subsequently became superstars. Avedon’s personal projects would become his true calling, however, as he documented the radical shifts in America’s cultural landscape, from the civil rights movement in the early sixties to the 1976 presidential contest between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford. He
continued to photograph for Vogue during the reign of Grace Mirabella in the 1970s and eighties, but when Anna Wintour took the helm in 1988 and revamped the look of the magazine, he severed his ties. He would continue his photojournalistic work and portraiture as staff photographer for The New Yorker until he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 2004. Without question, Avedon’s meteoric impact on the medium of photography remains unrivaled. As The New Yorker wrote upon his death, “As long as people remain curious about life in the twentieth century, they will turn to Avedon’s photographs to see how it looked, and what it meant.”
Richar RichardRichard
rd
“As long as people remain curious about life in the twentieth century, they will turn to Avedon’s photographs to see how it looked, and what it meant.”
text source: http://www.vogue.com/voguepedia/Photographers