At the Centennial of Helmut Newton’s birth where does his legacy stand today?

This year marks the centennial birthday of one of the masters of late twentieth century photography. Helmut Newton overturned the prevailing conventions surrounding both fine art and fashion photography, bringing controversy and conversation to each and in the process innovated a new formula for editorial photography. His works reverberated through fashion, art, and film, and dominated glamorous high-gloss magazines for decades. As a photographer, who straddled the gap between art and commerce, Newton explored the darker side of sexuality and reveled in nudity and erotic fantasies. He is criticized for his overly suggestive depiction of women, however he continuously strived for a contemporary female image at a time of gender and sexual liberation. His models were photographed as strong, triumphant and liberated, and with sole and total command over their bodies. Newton explored all the angles and planes of the female body—his models would not be turned shyly away from a camera—everything was defiantly on display.

Born in 1920 in Berlin as Helmut Neustädter to a Jewish family, Newton expressed an early interest in photography. He picked up his first camera at the age of 12 and in the following years he was often truant from school in order to photograph childhood girlfriends in the streets of Berlin. By the age of 16 it was clear that Newton would not be joining the family-run button factory and he started to work as an apprentice to portrait, nude and fashion photographer Else Neuländer Simon, better known as Yva, in Berlin-Charlottenburg.

His family was forced into exile after fleeing Germany in 1938, landing in Singapore, where Newton found work as a photographer at a local magazine. He was interned in Singapore and sent to Australia, where he served in the army for five years, eventually becoming an Australian citizen. Newton set up a studio in fashionable Flinders Lane in Melbourne going into partnership with Henry Talbot. Newton worked on fashion, theatre and industrial photography in the affluent postwar years. In 1947 he met actress June Browne, who was a fellow photographer and successfully shot under the pseudonym Alice Springs. The two married one year later and were working and living in close companionship for the rest of their lives. It was not until the end of the ‘50s that Newton and June returned to Europe, where he started shooting for British and French Vogue, Elle and Playboy. He was a working photographer gaining popularity through the ‘60s until a hedonistic lifestyle took its toll.

In 1971 Newton suffered a near-fatal heart attack and became hospitalized several times. Realizing that life is short, his approach to photography greatly changed, and he poured more of himself into his work than ever before. “The unnecessary work and the frantic competition are finished!” he revealed in Filthy magazine in 1976. “Today, I only take pictures for money or pleasure.” He began producing incendiary and seductive black-and-white series of nudes, or semi-nudes in settings that overturned the prevailing conventions of fashion photography. His photography exploded into the mainstream in the ‘70s, through partnerships with Yves Saint Laurent and Chanel, but primarily thanks to the striking photographs he produced on commission for French Vogue. His artistic talent gained recognition, which allowed him to complete more autonomous projects. He staged his first solo exhibition in 1975 at the Nikon Gallery in Paris and a year later, his first volume of photographs White Women was published. Over the course of his career spanning five decades, he would go on to exhibit worldwide and was featured in magazines and numerous monographs.