Whether Helmut Newton was shooting fashion for Italian Vogue or the famous for playboy, his photographs were always edgy, unpredictable and uncompromisingly erotic. His death in a car accident early this year at the age of 83 represents the loss of one of the world's great visual stylists.
Born in Berlin, Newton bought his first camera at the age of 12. His taste in women was influenced by the Prussian maids who worked in his family's prosperous household. He fled the Nazis as a teenager, landing in Australia via Singapore. There he acquired a down under accent, but his view of the world, and of women, remained profoundly Germanic. Fashion magazines in Europe and the United States began publishing Newton's work in the 1950s. His signature images of statuesque models clad in leather and high heels were sensuous, sometimes decadent, often criticized by feminists and widely emulated by other photographers.
Newton's fascination with photographing beautiful women led him to playboy, where his work first appeared in the mid-1970s. Actresses Charlotte Rampling, Debra Winger and Nastassia Kinski, and supermodels Grace Jones and Carla Bruni all posed for his lens. But his favorite Playboy subjects were Playmates, shot not in the typical Centerfold style but in highly charged and unconventional settings. As Newton would wryly remark on accepting an assignment, "Let's try something a little kinky this time."
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