09.Clayton Cubitt Helmut Newton lived a huge life. He learned
photography in the decadence of Berlin in the '30s, then fled
from the Nazis as they took power, and sailed to refuge in Singapore.
That’s a whole
fucking life right there. Most people would feel happy if that was their finished
biography.
Not Helmut Newton. He had to go on and change the face of both fashion and photography.
He
got Vogue to publish pictures that would make a dominatrix blush. At
the height of the feminist
'70s, he published a picture of a woman with a saddle on her back. (What’s more,
she looked quite satisfied about it.) He even mainstreamed medical fetishism,
using halos, leg braces and casts in his nude portraits. For the
second half
of
the twentieth century, Newton dominated the niche he helped define and perfect.
In
this
arena, the
space
he occupied
was vast.
