Gallery Artists

Estate of Helmut Newton

Portrait

Helmut Newton was a German fashion and portrait photographer known for his provocative nudes. In the 1950s and 1960s, his subversive and erotic visual language brought taboo themes such as Sado masochism and fetishism to the pages of the fashion magazines Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and Elle, which were aimed at a mass audience. Newton also photographed for the men's magazine Playboy.

Born on October 31, 1920 in Berlin under the name Helmut Neustädter, he dropped out of school in 1936 and began an apprenticeship with the respected photographer Yva. Two years later, the son of a Jewish button manufacturer fled to Australia to escape National Socialism. After the war, Newton opened a photo studio there and concentrated on fashion photography. His style is unmistakable: erotic on the border to sadomasochism. His photographs for various fashion magazines were among the first to present female nudes in a strong and triumphant manner, but his bold visual language is subliminally interwoven with decadence and cruelty, which are interwoven into complex narratives about sex and power. It is this double level that makes his art so unique within fashion photography.

He became internationally famous in the 1970s, when he mainly worked for French Vogue. He was celebrated for his controversial scenarios, powerful image lighting, and unusual compositions, which he preferred to stage on the street or in real interiors rather than in the studio. At the end of the 1970s Newton, concentrated on nude photography. Picture books such as Big Nudes (1982) made him world-famous and he also gained attention as a portrait photographer.

Newton later moved to the fashion capital Paris, where he photographed many celebrities and took some of his most iconic photographs. The photo Le Smoking, perhaps his most famous, illustrates the subversive elegance of his work: Helmut Newton's photographic art radiates classical glamour. Newton has received many awards and titles, including the Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Helmut Newton's portraits have been frequently exhibited, including in White Women, Sleepless Nights, and Big Nudes, as well as in numerous books. Newton died on 23 January 2004 at the age of 83 in a car accident in Los Angeles, where he lived in winter. At his own request, the photographer was buried in his native Berlin.

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