Helmut Newton

Helmut Newton (born Helmut Neustädter; 31 October 1920 – 23 January 2004) was a German-Australian photographer. The New York Times called him a "prolific, widely imitated fashion photographer whose provocative, erotically charged black-and-white photos were a mainstay of Vogue and other publications."

Newton grew up in Berlin. His father, Max Neustädter, owned a button factory; his mother was Klara "Claire" Neustädter, née Marquis. The family was Jewish. He attended the Heinrich-von-Treitschke-Realgymnasium and the American School in Berlin. At age twelve he bought his first camera and became interested in photography. From 1936 he worked for the German photographer Yva (Elsie Neuländer Simon). Under the Nuremberg Laws, restrictions on Jews tightened, and his father lost control of the factory. On Kristallnacht, 9 November 1938, Newton was briefly interned in a concentration camp, which pushed the family to leave Germany. His parents fled to Argentina. Newton got a passport just after turning eighteen and left Germany on 5 December 1938. In Trieste he boarded the Conte Rosso with about two hundred others escaping the Nazis, heading for China. He stopped in Singapore and found he could stay, first working briefly as a photographer for the Straits Times, then as a portrait photographer.

In 1940, British authorities interned Newton in Singapore and sent him to Australia on the Queen Mary, arriving in Sydney on 27 September 1940. Internees were taken by train under armed guard to a camp at Tatura. He was released in 1942 and briefly picked fruit in Northern Victoria. In August 1942 he enlisted in the Australian Army and worked as a truck driver. After the war, in 1945, he became a British subject and changed his surname to Newton in 1946.

In 1948 he married actress June Browne, who performed as June Brunell. She later became a successful photographer under the ironic pseudonym Alice Springs, after the town in Central Australia. In 1946 Newton set up a studio in fashionable Flinders Lane in Melbourne, working on fashion, theatre, and industrial photography in the prosperous postwar years. In May 1953 he shared his first exhibition with Wolfgang Sievers, another German refugee who had served in the same army company. Titled "New Visions in Photography," it was held at the Federal Hotel on Collins Street and was likely the first presentation of New Objectivity photography in Australia. Newton went into partnership with Henry Talbot, a fellow German Jew who had also been interned at Tatura. The association continued even after Newton left Australia for London in 1957. The studio was renamed Helmut Newton and Henry Talbot.

Newton’s reputation grew when he got a commission to illustrate fashions for a special Australian supplement in Vogue, published in January 1956. He won a twelve-month contract with British Vogue and left for London in February 1957, leaving Talbot to run the business. He left the magazine before the contract ended and went to Paris, working for French and German magazines. He returned to Melbourne in March 1959 for a contract with Australian Vogue.

Newton and his wife settled in Paris in 1961, and he continued fashion photography. His images appeared in magazines such as French Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. He developed a distinctive style marked by erotic, stylised images, often with sado-masochistic and fetishistic undertones. A heart attack in 1970 slowed his output, but his wife’s encouragement helped his profile grow, especially with the 1980 studio-bound stark infinity of the "Big Nudes" series. The "Naked and Dressed" portfolio followed, and in 1992 "Domestic Nudes," which represented the peak of his erotic-urban style. These series were underpinned by his technical skill. Newton also worked in portraiture and more fantastical studies. He shot pictorials for Playboy featuring Nastassja Kinski and Kristine DeBell. Original prints from his August 1976 DeBell pictorial, "200 Motels, or How I Spent My Summer Vacation," sold at Bonhams in 2002 for $21,075 and at Christie’s in December 2003 for $26,290.

In 2009, June Browne conceived a tribute exhibition to Newton featuring three photographers who had befriended him in Los Angeles in 1980: Mark Arbeit, Just Loomis, and George Holz. All three had been photography students at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. They became friends with Helmut and June Newton and, to varying degrees, assisted Helmut. Each went on to independent careers. The exhibition premiered at the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin and combined their work with personal snapshots, contact sheets, and letters from their time with Newton.

From the 1970s, Newton regularly used Polaroid instant cameras and film to quickly check composition and lighting, especially for fashion shoots. For the "Naked and Dressed" series, which began in 1981 for Italian and French Vogue, he said he used Polaroid film "by the crate." The Polaroids also served as a sketchbook, with notes about the model, client, location, and date. In 1992 he published *Pola Woman*, a book of only his Polaroids. Over three hundred works based on the original Polaroids were shown at the 2011 exhibition "Helmut Newton Polaroids" at the Museum für Fotografie in Berlin.

Newton died on 23 January 2004.