You get the feeling with much of his fashion photography that he is mocking the very notion of fashion, or the vanity and artifice of it. There's certainly a feel of 30s Berlin (or at least our perception of it) in his scenes of darkened decadence. "I like Berlin, but that's a different matter." Does he feel Jewish? "I'm what they call a bad Jew." He hasn't set foot in a synagogue since he was a schoolboy. Does he still feel German? "Of course I don't!" he exclaims, clearly affronted. From there he went to Australia, served in the Australian army as a truck driver, and worked as a fashion photographer in Melbourne, before returning to Europe in 1957. A sense of intense but unexplained drama permeated his work - as it does Newton's.īeing Jewish, the teenage Helmut and his parents fled Germany in 1938, his parents to South America and he to Singapore, where he worked for a very brief spell as a news photographer - "I was thrown out after two weeks 'cause I was no bloody good, ha ha!" - then, for a while, he had a portrait studio. Trials, political conferences and embassy soirées were Salomon's specialities, often shot in dark light and amid imposing architecture. Another inspiration is the work of the Berlin doc umentary photographer Erich Salomon, who died in Auschwitz. He loves the night-time photography of Brassaï - the two became friends a few years before the latter died - and says he's influenced by him still. In 1936, he was apprenticed to Yva, a society photographer. Soon, he started to take pictures of his mother and his girlfriends, and before long it was accepted that he would not be going to work in his father's button factory.
As a child, his mother would take him to tea dances at grand hotels, which he loved. Next, he shot, successfully, the city's Radio Tower ("a mini Eiffel Tower") in daylight. First, he tried some night-time shots on the darkened Berlin underground, but they didn't come out. Newton was born there in 1920, and was 12 when he first tried photography, with a Box Brownie. He concedes that the decadence that so famously permeated 30s Berlin left its mark on his young psyche. My wife said, 'When you look at your pictures, you cannot deny your past.' " But, on the other hand, you can't get out of your skin, there is a certain, I won't say vision, but point of view that is always with me. I can't think of anything more boring than walking into an exhibition and seeing the same old shit! Without evolution, things look sad. "That's something you do when you're dead. The exhibition, Helmut Newton: Work, to be shown later this month at the Barbican, London, has been curated by June and, Newton is keen to point out, is most definitely not a retrospective. The climate is good for his health (he has a heart condition) and, in the winter months, they follow the sun to Los Angeles.
#HELMUT NEWTON FAMOUS PHOTOS PROFESSIONAL#
He and his wife June (also a photographer - her professional name is Alice Springs) have lived in an apartment adjoining the office for the past 20 years.
Newton himself, bright-eyed and craggy-faced, is altogether affable as he directs me to the "boss's chair" in his office overlooking the bay of Monte Carlo. But they are not always easy to understand they're unsettling and chilling. The portraits are elegant and coldly revealing, and the fashion photography - unfurling, inexplicable dramas depicted in night-time settings and peopled by sleek, Amazonian women - have for decades been consistent in their vividness and vision. His photography is beautiful, powerful and disturbing too. Yet Newton's longevity - and his legendary status - point to something more. His pictures are known for their cold, voyeuristic mood, and even now they have the power to shock. Being professionally "dangerous" has been Newton's thing ever since the 60s, when his fashion photography brought nudity and overtly sexual imagery on to the glossy pages of French Vogue and Germany's Stern. That this tanned, octo-genarian, in his smart-but-casual, v-necked Côte d'Azur attire, should be armed with a pistol seems a little surprising. Helmut Newton is holding out a gun for my inspection.
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