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| Feature: Helmut Newton 10/05/01 | |
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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
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