In 1978, he furnished the photographs for the thriller Eyes of Laura Mars, a film about a female photographer who is, essentially, Newton's doppelganger: She stages shoots where strong models, dressed in pastel tatters, stand over a male corpse while dancing to Let's All Chant where the same girls caper in huge, louche furs as cars ignite and burn around them.From March 24 to June 25, 2023, Palazzo Reale in Milan is hosting a major exhibition dedicated to Helmut Newton: titled "Legacy," it is designed to mark the centenary of the photographer's birth.įrom March 24 to June 25, 2023, the halls of Palazzo Reale in Milan are devoting an extensive retrospective to one of the greatest photographers of the second half of the 20th century, Helmut Newton (Berlin, 1920 - Los Angeles, 2004). Like her argument that cinema is a sort of ceaseless eye watching over female subjects, Newton asserted that "any photographer who says he's not a voyeur is either stupid or lying." But he also went on to challenge what that voyeurism means for those being watched. Netwon's disco-bloodbath work – of tawdry, sexy girls playing with whips and chains, or lounging on the beach in Maui in full-length couture, smoking and ravishing their fancy men – debuted around the same time as Laura Mulvey's still-popular critique of the "male gaze." His work presented stylishly violent images – dramatically challenging not only the nature of fashion photography, but the act of seeing and being seen. He may have been leery of all the art shows: Newton loathed the word "art," and frequently stated that he "just took pictures" and and this work was "for a very definite purpose: to influence, to sell a product, in short, for propaganda."īut if Newton's art was propaganda, his message wasn't always obvious. Is Newton's work, which, for all its decadence, always featured women possessed of a certain robustness (of form or spirit) being newly celebrated for its remarkable currency?
Vogue's comment on this also invokes a new world for women in and out of fashion: "For an industry that should be about empowering women of all shapes, sizes, and ages, too often the image of attractiveness it has projected has been entirely at odds with that message." This campaign stands as an unprecedented stance in the fashion industry who are now "specifying guidelines for a healthier diet vowing to identify and help those vulnerable to eating disorders establishing minimum age requirements for models creating a model-mentorship program and asking that models be provided with plentiful breaks and access to nutritious food during shoots and shows." This sense of availability I find erotic." By availability, he meant eagerness, the kind of salubrious-yet-dirty woman we are seeing in everything from Girls to the rise of sexy-nasty female comics, to the now infamous Anastasia Steele.Ĭoncomitantly, the new issue of (American) Vogue features Team USA's "Wonder Women," a poolside, black-banded J-Lo and a feature about Vogue International's commitment to the Council of Fashion Designers of America's Health Initiative. "I think the woman who gives the appearance of being available is sexually much more exciting than a woman who's completely distant. "There must be a certain look of availability in the women I photograph," Newton wrote in the book White Women. It follows a show of Newton's work at the Grand Palais in Paris and another one just launched in Los Angeles.
And it would appear we are doing just that with the late, unparalleled Helmut Newton.Īlthough the infamous fashion photographer was killed in a car crash in 2004, he's back in the news this week with Three Boys from Pasadena, a new tribute to him in Berlin by his three most intimate protégées – Mark Arbeit, George Holz and Just Loomis. He is buried in Berlin beside Marlene Dietrich, who sang, so wearily, so hauntingly, of Falling in Love Again.
0 kommentar(er)
