068 | 4WDTouringAustraliaIntroducing, the Jewish refugee who learnt his chops in
the outback, and then went on to re-invent global fashion
photography...
Newton escaped the rise of the Nazi Party in the 1930s
and ended up in Singapore, where the young photog
became a gigolo. Not seeing much of a future in this, he
moved to Melbourne and did ve years with the Australian
Army during WWII.
Shortly before his death Newton explained to Salon
that his early years in Australia were the bedrock he built
his style on – ‘’The point of my photography has always
been to challenge myself... To go a little further than my
Germanic discipline would permit me to.’’
And the sprawling outback was just the place to do
that. To have his creative boundaries pushed by a natural
environment that was boundary-less. He was schooled
in Berlin but saw his new home as the ultimate blank
canvas. He married a Melbourne girl called June, another
photographer, who went by the arch-Australian name
‘Alice Springs’.
Although in his later years he became the world’s
foremost fashion photographer, feted in New York and
Paris, it all started with an unlikely alliance with Shell Oil,photographing post-war nation building projects through-
out Australia, and the migrants who worked on them.
Art domo, Professor Helen Ennis recently described
Newton’s “choice of everyday subject matter... The use
of sharp focus, the arrangement of bold, simpli ed forms,
and the favouring of dramatic vantage points...
“The worker masters the machine, even though he might
be dwarfed by it – an image of workmen placing packing
timbers under an absorber tower shows their mastery of a
mighty piece of equipment. The dignity of labour is very
evident.”
Together with fellow ex-German New Photographer
Wolfgang Seivers, Newton took industrial and architectural
photography to a whole new global level.
Although his camera felt free in the wide open spaces, in
his other life as a city fashion photographer in Melbourne,
he found himself hemmed in by a much more conservative
media and society than in Europe.
His true photographic passion was to show the way that
fashion bonded with sex and power, and he was forced to
esh out his mysteries of the esh back in Europe, where
he eventually became known as the King of Kink.
Upon his death, the New York Times summed up his
approach to fashion photography: “Often in stark black and
white, (they) were calculated to shock, featuring tall, blond,
sometimes naked women in heels, perhaps illuminated by
headlights or trapped in a dark alley. Models were depicted
in ways that few readers expected.
So, how does his early work for Shell at the Corio re n-
ery in Victoria, shooting refugee workmen compare with
his later Vogue shoots of bondage-clad and riding-crop-
wielding Fendi models in a Monaco hotel room?
The LaTrobe Journal explains: “His dramatic vantage-
points and bold shapes are exempli ed repeatedly in his
photographs of the Geelong re nery.
“The workmen photographed in their working environ-
ment are just as much ‘models’ as the mannequins and
nudes are ‘models’ in environments which give point to
their poses or nudity.”Helmut Newton
‘Shell House Journal’, 1954
Surf Coast, Victoria
© Helmut Newton/ LaTrobe
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