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By Dana Thomas
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Helmut Newton, the provocative German photographer who introduced kink to mainstream fashion, died following a car crash in Hollywood on Friday at 83. Long plagued with cardiac problems--he shot several blunt self-portraits while connected to EKG machines--Newton suffered a heart attack as he drove his Cadillac into a wall at the Chateau Marmont hotel on Sunset Boulevard.
Newton's work was known for its hard-edged eroticism and straightforward point of view. His women were usually clad in towering black patent stilettos, blood red lipstick and not much else. Among his most famous images is a 1973 portrait of actress Charlotte Rampling naked on top of a table, and a 1975 shot of a female model dressed in a razor-sharp Yves Saint Laurent men's suit, hair slicked back, smoking a cigarette on a dark Parisian street. Newton's more extreme pictures--high-heeled women wrapped in bandages and confined to wheelchairs, naked women cinched in children's medical corsets--enraged feminists around the world, who labeled him a cruel misogynist. It was a charge he dismissed as "stupid and simple-minded." "Would I spend my life photographing something I hate?" he told NEWSWEEK in 1998. "I think women become more powerful [in my pictures] because they exude a great sexuality that will surely conquer the male. I think I'm a feminist."
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Born in Berlin to a rich Jewish family in 1920, Newton bought his first camera when he was 12. As a teen, he worked with the German photographer Yva, but in 1938 he fled Nazi Germany and eventually settled in Australia, where he took up fashion photography and met June Browne, an actress. They married in 1948. "When he proposed to me, he did say that I would always be his second love, that photography would be his first and he would never, ever, give it up," his wife said. "I thought that was marvelous."
The Newtons moved to France in the 1960s, where Helmut quickly established a reputation for shattering the polite conventions of fashion photography. His breakthrough erotic fashion picture came in 1975 when he shot a plump model in a gown slit up the back as she climbed the stairs of a French chateau, her round, naked rump revealed. "After that," June remembered, "he went to town." By the late 1970s, Newton's fashion pictures of alluring lesbian couplings and couture dominatrixes had earned him the moniker "The King of Kink."
Newton told NEWSWEEK last spring that his greatest influences in photography were paparazzi and the photographer Brassai--"the night pictures, the lower depths of night." He took his cues from both. He preferred to shoot with a handheld camera in natural light--he would counsel young aspiring photographers to "never be afraid to shoot in low light" --and printed the images as he took them, with no cropping or retouching. "Some people's photography is an art. Mine is not," he said. "If they happen to be exhibited in a gallery or a museum, that's fine. But that's not why I do them. I'm a gun for hire." He hit the target every time.
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