Graphis interview: Helmut Newton, The

Graphis, Sep/Oct 2002 by Kaplan, Michael

It is a weekday morning in the staid lobby of midtown Manhattan's Regency Hotel. Comfy chairs and sofas are occupied by men and women in business attire, reading the Times and Journal, synching-- up for impending meetings. Photographer Helmut Newton is older than everyone within eyeshot. However, as he exits the elevator, dressed in a black sweater, baggy but beaten up dress slacks, pink socks and white sneakers, 81-year-old Newton looks far cooler than anyone in the room-and he exudes a sense of thrown-together style that puts the rest of us to shame.

While Newton's images maintain a strong sense of aesthetic consistency, his own life is a study in contrasts. He's been married to the same woman for 40 years even though the photos he shoots are as perverse as any. He effortlessly slaloms between high and low society; takes the kinds of shots that routinely surf from editorial to advertising to art-preferably managing to achieve this hat trick with a single image. What the pictures tend to share is a sense of European decadence, but that is not especially surprising when you consider that Newton's earliest visions are of Berlin at its most rambunctious. He was born in Germany in 1920, to a wealthy American mother and a father who owned a button factory. By age 16 Newton was apprenticing with a famous Berlin photographer named Yva. Early on, he developed a love for photographing the city at night. Brassai, whom Newton knew personally, certainly remains to this day an important influence on his work. Newton then seemed poised to follow in the footsteps of Erich Salomon, an influential Berlin-based documentary photographer, who was known for shooting darkly lit images. But by 1938 anti-Semitism raged in Germany and Newton, who is Jewish, fled the Fatherland for Singapore. Salomon was less lucky: he died in Auschwitz.

Newton briefly worked for a Singapore newspaper and opened his own photo studio before relocating to Australia where he met his wife June and began shooting fashion photos. Through the '60s and '70s Newton's style evolved into a documentation of the outrageous: X-rays of women, women with braces on their feet and legs, women in the nude, women in wet t-shirts, women wrestling, women looking strong and dominant, women fetishizing everything from raw chicken to spiky high-heels. Primarily a fashion photographer-- though Newton has shot everything from travel to portraiture-he has strongly influenced today's generation of image-makers who employ the kind of unbridled sexuality that Newton has been exploiting for years. While they're doing that, Newton has recently turned to displaying his landscapes-albeit, alongside the provocative images that are his trademarks,

Graphis: You started taking pictures when you were 12 years old, shooting with a Brownie box camera. What did you photograph?

Newton: My first picture was of a radio tower in Berlin, which is a kind of mini-version of the Eiffel Tower. It looks like a toothpick and I thought it was great. After that I photographed myself, my mother, my dog, my girlfriends. I photographed my girlfriends regularly. Later on, when I was 15 or 16, I got myself a 200 watt flood light, just a single round globe. Now whenever I use artificial light, which I hardly ever do, I still use that same kind of flood.

Graphic: Who were your early influences?

Newton: Back then, in the '30s in Europe, everything was about Alexander Rodchenko. Everything was diagonal, and I loved it. I still do.

Graphic: Tell us how you evolved from those early days.

Newton: Technically, I have not changed very much. Ask my assistants. They'll tell you, I am the easiest photographer to work with. I don't have heavy equipment. I work out of one bag.

Graphic: Does that mean that you spend a lot of time talking to your models rather than resorting to technical trickery?

Newton: No, no, no. I spend a lot of time preparing. I think a lot about what I want to do. I have prep books, little notebooks in which I write everything down before a sitting. Otherwise I would forget my ideas.

Graphic: A shot of yours that really stands out for me is the one that shows a woman on a hotel bed with a saddle on her back, like she's a horse. How had that come about?

Newton: I was very interested in sadomasochism. It's perfectly legitimate. This was shot in a beautiful Paris hotel for a men's magazine called Adam that Vogue published at the time. Well, I've always considered Hermes to be the world's greatest sex shop-with its whips, saddles, spurs. We spent an afternoon there, selecting all kinds of things from the cases, went back to the hotel room, and I had one girl ride the other. In a particular photo one girl has a whip clenched between her teeth. She looked great. But I think Mr. Hermes had a fit when he saw the photos. Actually a lot of advertisers have fits when they see what I do with their products. A favorite shot of mine is one of a woman wearing Bulgari jewels and stuffing a chicken. Needless to say, Bulgari thought it was a terrible thing for me to do with their jewels.