[BRIEF NOTE] Helmut Newton
Oct. 19th, 2005 09:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldYesterday evening, I took home from work a promotional folio for Helmut Newton's Sumo, a physically massive Taschen compendium of German-born photographer Helmut Newton's photographer work. The folio has only a few works, granted. Still, they're iconic, and so big. To wit:
"Sie kommen" (Ger: "They are coming") is actually a collection of two photos. The first is the one you can see behind the cut, of the four statuesque models, completely nude but for their shoes, walking in a photo studio. The second is (perhaps unsurprisingly) not online, showing the same models in almost exactly the same positions, this time clothed in the latest Parisian fashions of the early 1980s. The two photos were first published in a 1982 issue French Vogue, quite graphically illustrating the need for fashionable women to have a body just as well-tailored as their clothes.
I came in for some mild ribbing at last night's Babylon 5 viewing session, one friend simply noting the incongruity of me handling of pictures of naked women. Quite apart from my interest in women--a passing one admittedly, but it's still there!--I don't see any incongruity at all. Sex is certainly present in Newton's pictures, of course. The one image in the folio, taken in Nice in the 1990s, that shows Newton applying blush to the breast of a model as she lies on a divan, proves that as clearly as the entire corpus of his work. His photography is certainly commercial, Newton is the king of the fetish photographers.
Looking at his photos, though, what strikes me as more important still than their sexuality is the overall system of power relationships that Newton's photographs document. These are beautiful women, yes, caught in provocative poses doing unusual things, and their images certainly are sexually charged. To me, the highly contested and decidedly non-static way in which the models relate to each other and to the camera, as in Newton's famous fashion photographs of the 1970s, the ones showing women dressed in the latest fashion fighting amongst themselves in the streets of a burning city, is the key to the man's oeuvre. Things are going on--angry things, combative things, tense things--and the viewer can't help but pay attention to these.
"Sie kommen" (Ger: "They are coming") is actually a collection of two photos. The first is the one you can see behind the cut, of the four statuesque models, completely nude but for their shoes, walking in a photo studio. The second is (perhaps unsurprisingly) not online, showing the same models in almost exactly the same positions, this time clothed in the latest Parisian fashions of the early 1980s. The two photos were first published in a 1982 issue French Vogue, quite graphically illustrating the need for fashionable women to have a body just as well-tailored as their clothes.
I came in for some mild ribbing at last night's Babylon 5 viewing session, one friend simply noting the incongruity of me handling of pictures of naked women. Quite apart from my interest in women--a passing one admittedly, but it's still there!--I don't see any incongruity at all. Sex is certainly present in Newton's pictures, of course. The one image in the folio, taken in Nice in the 1990s, that shows Newton applying blush to the breast of a model as she lies on a divan, proves that as clearly as the entire corpus of his work. His photography is certainly commercial, Newton is the king of the fetish photographers.
Looking at his photos, though, what strikes me as more important still than their sexuality is the overall system of power relationships that Newton's photographs document. These are beautiful women, yes, caught in provocative poses doing unusual things, and their images certainly are sexually charged. To me, the highly contested and decidedly non-static way in which the models relate to each other and to the camera, as in Newton's famous fashion photographs of the 1970s, the ones showing women dressed in the latest fashion fighting amongst themselves in the streets of a burning city, is the key to the man's oeuvre. Things are going on--angry things, combative things, tense things--and the viewer can't help but pay attention to these.
