![]() ![]() The result was a set of twenty-four postcards of Newton’s photographs back-to-back with twenty-four photographs of our own. ![]() Shir’s birthday was coming up, and we had decided to re-create the images of her favorite photographer, Helmut Newton, using our own bodies and our own sense of story and immediacy to create an aesthetic of poverty. When I was thirteen, my mother and I had just moved to Israel, and I had developed a tradition with my new friends of creating elaborate birthday gifts for one another as a sort of excuse for a group art project. I doubt I quite knew what a femme fatale was when I had my first self aware encounter with Helmut Newton’s work, though her archetype seemed to stare right at me through every photograph. A fragmented photo of a five-year-old femme fatale. I distinctly remember tearing it into pieces smaller than the pearls around my neck and hiding those pieces, like shadows of a secret, under the sofa, only to find them magically recomposed on my mother’s dresser the next morning. Embarrassed then - no, not embarrassed, mortified by my budding sexuality (why is it that the sound of that word “sexuality” makes a girl want to cringe and blush at the same time?), I yanked it down. I found the photo posted on my mother’s vanity mirror next to a classically beautiful close-up of my sister. The only variation from the norm, from the standards of good taste, was that I preferred her accessories against my nude body instead of her actual clothes. Like most five- year-old girls (and some boys) I used to love playing dress up with my mother’s clothes. The girl in the photograph, the naked girl at the bottom of the steps with the umbrella, the girl wearing the pearls, is me at age five. She is hard and soft, part joyful, part menacing, both coy and direct. She is open to view, exposed-besides those heels, a string of pearls too heavy for her fragile neck to carry, and an umbrella, open, pointing up into the air, ready for use. Her naked prepubescent body takes up the greater half of the photograph. They are thin, small, soft, and fitted with a pair of violent heels, obviously too large for her tiny feet. The warm afternoon light strokes the ends of her dimly lit legs. Skewing Lines: On Pervs, Pearls and Sex Dolls One of his favourite subjects was his wife of 55 years, June, who survived the car crash, which is thought to have happened after Newton suffered a heart attack.Perfection, perfect women, and perfect sex (as if such a thing exists) may be Newton’s medium, his outer preoccupation, his aesthetic obsession, but they are not the subject of his work. Newton worked with top models and showbiz stars including Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Jerry Hall and actress Charlotte Rampling. ![]() Designer Donatella Versace added: "He was an incredible talent and an amazing person with a warm sense of humour. "He set off a new look in photography that no one else has competed with," said O'Neil. His photographs now sell for as much as £11,000 each. Newton, who was Jewish, was forced to flee Germany in 1938 to escape Nazi persecution.For a time he was a gigolo in Singapore.ĭuring the Sixties and Seventies he was famous for his on-the-street black-and-white fashion shots. He started taking photographs at 12 and spent a lifetime taking sexually-provocative pictures of stunning women in glamorous locations for glossy magazines like Vogue. German-born Newton - also known as the King of Kink - invented a whole new genre of photography known as porno-chic, with shocking images such as a girl with her legs apart and a gun barrel in her mouth. Supermodel Claudia Schiffer said: "I will miss him." "He was an all-time great," said celebrity photographer Terry O'Neil of the man who became know as the 35mm Marquis de Sade. HE was the greatest and most controversial photographer the fashion world has ever known.Īnd yesterday friends and rivals queued up to pay tribute to Helmut Newton, 83, who died in a car crash in Los Angeles on Friday. ![]()
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