HELMUT NEWTON
German
Born Helmut Neustaedter in Berlin in 1920, to Jewish
parents, he grew up in privileged circumstances in the
home of his wealthy button-manufacturer father and
American mother. Newton’s father sent him to attend
the city’s American School, but he was a bad student
and was expelled when his fascination with photo-
graphy, sparked by an Agfa box camera bought
when he was 12, along with his interest in girls, over-
shadowed his interest in learning. After leaving
school in 1936, the young Newton apprenticed to
top photographer Elsie Simon, known as Yva, until
he was forced to flee after the start of Hitler’s vicious
pogroms against German Jews two years later. Upon
flirting with death by consorting with Aryan girls, his
parents managed to secure him passage on a ship to
China, but he stopped off in Singapore, where he got
a job as a photojournalist at theStraits Timesnews-
paper, a job he held for just two weeks, after which he
was fired for incompetence.
There he met a glamorous older Belgian woman,
and, powered by an epic sex drive, became her lover;
he caroused around the British colony until moving
to Australia in 1940, just ahead of the Japanese
invasion. After briefly being interned as a German
citizen, he later joined the Australian army, serving
five years, and, in 1948, married actress June Bru-
nell, a fellow photographer who later would both
photograph Newton and work with him on his
books. She sometimes published under the name
Alice Springs, a legendary sheep station in the Aus-
tralian outback. She would remain his partner for
more than 55 years until his death. It was during this
time he changed his name to Newton, opened a
small photo studio in Melbourne, and soon began
contributing fashion photos to French Voguein
1961, a magazine that he stamped with his trade-
mark images for a quarter century. Throughout the
years, Newton shot extensive campaigns for the
major fashion houses, began shooting celebrities
and royalty, and contributed to magazines such as
Playboy,Queen,Nova,Marie-Claire,Elle, and the
American, Italian, and German editions ofVogue.
His stark and provocative style set a new industry
standard. He began to photograph overtly sexual
images after a major heart attack in 1971 and with
the encouragement of his wife. His nudes became his
signature and the self-reflexive, often isolated poses
ofthe modelsfrequentlycausedcontroversy intheart
world. With the publication of his erotic photo book
White Womenin the 1970s, he won the sobriquets
‘‘The Prince of Porn’’ and ‘‘The King of Kink’’ (nick-
names that he disdained). His sado-masochistic
stamp was so visually arresting he was constantly
turning down offers to direct feature films. His work
began fetching upwards of $100,000 each at auction.
One of his most well known publications is the
oversizedBig Nudes, which distributed his work to a
wider audience, where he has been celebrated by
novelists, such as J. G. Ballard and semioticians,
such as Marshall Blonsky, and criticized by the
Moral Majority and feminists. In 1998, Scalo pub-
lishersreleasedPagesfromtheGlossies,acollectionof
not just his most important fashion shots, but of the
entire magazinepages, giving context to their original
reception—a rare opportunity in photo publishing.
One of the most ambitious projects surrounding
Newton was one of his last. In 2000, he had a
mammoth retrospective at the International Center
of Photography in New York (the first show in its
new mid-town gallery). Also that year, art publish-
ers Taschen releasedSumo, a collection so big it
came with its own table. The book, which weighs
some 65 pounds, had a limited print run of 10,000
copies and carried a price tag of $5,000—making it
the most expensive book ever published. But some-
how this would seem fitting for the man who came
to weave so fluidly into the worlds of super-celeb-
rity, super-power, and super-wealth. No matter
how exclusive or infamous his subjects might be,
they were all props in Newton’s world, playthings
for an imaginative boy who grew up in the heady
world of the Weimar Republic.
An Australian citizen, Newton lived in Monte
Carlo in the summer and at Hollywood’s famed
Chateau Marmont hotel in the winter. He defied
convention with his paradoxical images—in his
most controversial and iconic images one finds,
for example, icy coldness coupled with heated pas-
sion and painful emotional distance mixed with an
unnerving intimacy. In Newton’s realm the viewer
is, for all intents and purposes, a voyeur. Subjects
of his photographs seem to hand themselves over
to him, in body and soul, all the while representing
Newton himself first and foremost. No matter whatNEWTON, HELMUT