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Helmut Newton, Queen. Venice, 1966 ©Helmut Newton Foundation

One of Helmut Newton’s most beautiful and famous photos Born Helmut Neustädter in Berlin in 1920 to a Jewish family,
is entitled Rue Abriot, from the Parisian street in the Marais where he made time for photography by working as an apprentice to Yva,
it was taken and where the photographer lived for years. It is a famous fashion photographer, before leaving Germany in 1938
1975, and Danish actress and model Vibeke Knudsen, with whom and settling in Singapore. He then moved to Australia, where he
Newton often worked, is standing in the middle of the street, changed his last name to the one by which we all know him and
holding a cigarette and wearing the legendary Le Smoking, the began freelancing as a photographer. There he also collaborated
women’s tuxedo designed by Yves Saint Laurent. Ended up on the with the local edition of Vogue, obtaining an agreement with the
cover of French Vogue, that photo is part of a triptych: in the other British Vogue, which brought him back to Europe in 1957, only
two photos, a completely nude model, except for a pair of patent to be called to France, to Paris, in 1961. Thus began his famous
leather heeled shoes, approaches and kisses Vibeke. collaborations with the fashion world and with magazines such
These are splendid shots, in which one can find all of as Harper’s Bazaar and Playboy, which made him a reference for
Newton’s transgressive and provocative charge, his desire to play designers such as Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld, Thierry Mugler
with eroticism in a new and non–trivial way, giving it a strong and the Chanel fashion house.
intellectual charge and intertwining it with power dynamics and But it was in the 1970s, in which he was often in the
fetishism, often and willingly overturning traditional roles (as for United States, that Helmut Newton, influenced by German
example in Woman Examining Man, another equally famous and expressionism as much as by the cinema of Hitchcock and
symbolic photo from the same year). His ability to make art in the Fellini, by noir as much as by crime photography, by surrealism
context of the fashion world, to be both elegant and provocative at as much as by BDSM aesthetics, would perfect the style that has
the same time. been called “porno–chic.”

72 Portrait Protagonist