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Helmut Newton: Reclaiming The Female Nude Photograph From Pornography

Victoria Z. Alexander

I. Introduction

 

“Newton’s photographs are stills from an elegant and erotic movie, perhaps entitled ‘Midnight at the Villa’ or ‘Afternoons in Super-Cannes’, a virtual film that has never played at any theatre but has screened itself inside our heads for the past forty years” (J. G. Ballard in O’Hagen, 2005).

“Nothing has been retouched, nothing electronically altered. I photographed what I saw” (Newton, 2000:29)

Over the past forty years Helmut Newton (1920-2004) has come to be considered as one of the world’s leading and most influential makers of visionary images. At the time of his death the photographic medium was in his debt as it is to only a few brilliant photographers in history. He specialized in fashion images, female nudes, and portraits.  His work was widely published in magazines such as Elle, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Paris Match, der Spiegel, and Stern. There have been over 100 exhibitions of his work since 1975, he was awarded the Medallion d’Or by France for his work, and a museum dedicated to that work has been opened in Berlin (2004).

Many of his more celebrated images are female nudes. For this special issue of Euro Art devoted to photography I have decided to consider a question which has long interested me about his work: Can a photographer, in our time, make images of nude females which are taken seriously or, have we abandoned the female nude to the realm of the pornographer? While many traditional feminists have occupied the latter position, I am pleased to say that most other commentators and critics have found Newton’s work to be vital in the effort to reclaim the female nude from makers of pornographic imagery.  

 

II. The Newton Look

Newton’s aesthetic sensibilities were deeply influenced by his childhood in Berlin and a 1920s-30s “look” in which strong Baroque light and shadow often play deciding roles in the structure of the image (Newton, 2002:34 ff.; see also Ruhrburg, 1998:655). Karl Lagerfeld once touched upon a vital aspect of Newton: “He was a graphic artist with a sense of composition in his imagery, with Berlin’s silent movies and a whole history in his pictures. … Berlin was him, he was Berlin… he was the last link to a Germany that I did not know but that I can understand” (in Menkes, 2004). Newton deeply admired Brassai’s images of Paris at night from the 1930s and his ideal woman was Marlene Dietrich. He was in possession of a rare talent for shadow and light and he understood, as very few have, what a great photograph must do: it must arouse thoughts of a complex narrative quickly enough to seize our attention in a world plastered with images. His models, who usually worked for the best agencies in London, Paris, and New York, are interesting to look at but never more so than the context and surroundings in which Newton places them. He avoided working with the more famous models who’s aura would dominate the image.

 

III. Pushing At The Boundaries

Newton demonstrated his absolute mastery of the medium in a shoot for French Vogue in 1981. On the left of the fold we meet an image of four elegant fashion models naked except for their shoes. Here is an image many would find highly desirable.  

On the opposite page we find the same four models, in almost exactly the same positions [the models have traded shoes and the woman second from the left has shifted her weight to the right leg], wearing the clothes of fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld. Newton’s gamble was that the designer (and most readers) would notice how fabulous the four models appear in Lagerfeld’s designs. The magic of the two images side by side is that the nude models come off as “less” than when clothed. Here are four women, who come close to the contemporary beauty myth ideal as raw bodies, who look even better in these particular clothes. Then French Vogue editor Francine Crescent placed her job at risk by devoting eight pages of the magazine to the shoot. Today this series of images is considered among the most interesting (and influential) ever published in a magazine. American Vogue was unable to run the spread because nude models could not be seen in the magazines of the most free of all nations where the nude female was still almost entirely in the domain of the pornographer. This condition was a significant part of what Newton challenged – the veil placed over the nude in the West – a veil of pornography where images of nude females are monopolized by pornographers. Newton played a vital role in pulling at this veil and outside of America (which instead slipped into the back seat with Ronald Reagan), he  elevated the photograph of the female nude in mainstream culture. He also encouraged us to not see women as victims and, and ironically given his profession, often forced us to ask why is it that anyone feels they should dress the way people in magazines do?

 

Today young feminists have reclaimed everything traditionally feminine and combined it with very self aware and shrewd ideas concerning fashion and the importance of an independent look. Young feminists today do not feel forced to fit into fashion but are quite willing to force it into their look on their own terms. These women appealed to Newton more than to those traditional feminists who would rather look only for victims. The victims today seem to be more likely to be boys and men where fashion is concerned as so many continue to labour under sartorial restrictions that many women have rejected (one wonders how long the tired neck-tie and business suit – the ultimate “clone” look – can continue to exist?) Newton’s images should not be overlooked in the overall shift in women’s self consciousness which has taken place over the past quarter century although his role in empowering women was limited.

 

IV. The Empowerment of Women?

I think the criticism that Newton was a “stiletto feminist” is fairly accurate. However, his work is certainly not a smooth dovetail with pre-liberated versions of femininity. While he clearly has a preference for powerful women (and he married a powerful, talented and articulate woman [the photographer Alice Springs who is seen in image 1 above]), Newton’s images are probably more concerned with the advancement of the nude, and the advancement of Newton as an image maker, than they are with the advancement of women. Still, it is important to acknowledge that during the years when gender roles in the West were being rearticulated, Newton provided powerful images to stimulate the discussion. Newton’s women, naked and clothed, maintain a strong sense of self possession before the camera and this is no accident. He certainly provided interesting images for those seeking representations of what a post-feminist femininity might look like. In images he made for many magazines, including even Playboy, we find women playing a dominant role. Indeed, throughout his images of men they are portrayed as secondary, weak, often serving women,  and are usually portrayed as powerless. If Newton’s women are sex objects they are so while in control of their identity and usually their environment (see Menkes, 2004).

Feminists, at least the more paranoid and reactionary among them, have tended to write Newton off as a misogynist. Was he? I rather doubt it. While his images were at least, in part, a product of a culture in which misogyny plays no small part, he certainly did not go out of his way to demean women. Even if the viewer believes the image to be misogynistic it is important to press analysis further into the overall location of the image in the culture. Picasso too could be labeled a misogynist (and surely he was), but this does not mean that we cannot appreciate cubism – including his potent cubist portraits of the women in his life in the 1930s. To do so is to occupy a kind of fundamentalist position that many today would be very uncomfortable with.

As easily as he made his living from it, Newton could make images which undermined the fashion industry and the ridiculousness of something like high heels and the artificial ideals of femininity which are deep in our culture (and Newton’s own fantasy realm).

In Bluemarine Newton forces us to look at the preposterousness of the ideal. Newton’s critics have often been in possession of an unfortunately impoverished understanding of irony which allows the subtlety of Newton’s wit to elude them. Measuring Room is a wonderful poke at the obsession developing at the time for a model’s dimensions.

If we are to better appreciate Newton’s images I also believe that we need to take into account the fact that he, like all of us, is the product of a particular place and time. Newton matured into a culture which deeply appreciated surrealism and fantasy. Many of Newton’s images are inspired by his own fantasy
world. The fact that they were so widely praised and published tells us that he struck a cord with a significant number of other people (among which I am obviously to be included as are many magazine editors). A man of Newton’s time and place would also be likely to subscribe to a view of woman’s power that many today have lost. This is a view of women which the philosopher Jean Baudrillard also shared as Gerry Coulter explained in the Spring 2008 issue of Euro Art (Coulter, 2008).

Coulter, in explaining the effort to write Kees van Dongen out of the 20th century artistic canon, has interesting things to say about something which is also important to our consideration of Newton, but is never discussed in relation to his imagery. This involves woman’s power of seduction. Coulter, drawing on Baudrillard notes that like so many words in English the very definition of seduction is formed from within “a patriarchal base which ignores any possible positive or powerful association of the word for women”. He goes on to say that seduction, in the Baudrillardian sense, stands against “the prejudiced view that the masculine is in itself a sexual identity”. Accordingly, it is the feminine which contradicts old notions of a masculine/feminine opposition and abolishes the idea of unitary sexual identity (Ibid).

Woman’s power of seduction is often viewed by people of Newton’s generation as not a negative thing, but as a powerful form of challenge and a claim to a radical otherness. Again from Coulter: “Seduction in this view, denies the supremacy of either sex as it understands the reversible quality of the masculine and the feminine which are possessed by both sexes. As the sex defined as lesser historically, women then have a kind of privileged position in relation to seduction. Seduction is a form of reversibility with the power to undo production – including the production of woman as a lesser being by men. In this very important sense, women know they are not ‘women’” (Ibid.).

I think Newton possessed this understanding of woman’s power of seduction including their power over the photographer. Newton also possessed a kind of surrealist fascination with shadows and death and the danger ever present in women’s lives. He tries to imagine both of these contradictory phenomena with remarkable effect in many diverse images.

Newton’s images of women emphasize many of the contradictions which surround women’s lives – that they be beautiful, sensual, available, powerful, and demurring. He seems to oscillate between a lesbian reading of woman as ‘butch’ and ‘fem’. There are as many ways of seeing Newton’s images of women as there are of seeing women. I wonder if this should be held against a photographer as to me it seems he had a fairly good understanding of the complexities of women’s lives. In his own words: “I’m against this ghetto that women are put in, often by themselves, ‘women photographers’, ‘women artists’, what counts is the work. …A woman who is a shrinking wallflower, who is not intelligent and strong and self assertive, is uninteresting to put it mildly. …I like a strong woman! A domineering woman, like a macho man, is boring” (quoted in Baker, 2001).

 
I think that most of Newton’s images are intentionally provocative and some of them are made to disturb. Newton photographed his surreal dream world and in doing so makes us realize that each of our dream world’s contain some remarkably erotic as well as surreal and even disturbing characters. As such he forces many men (and some women too) to ask why is it that they would like to be alone with Cyberwoman 7? At the same time, when we look at her eyes, we are forced to ask: ‘What is it about her, in apparent handcuffed powerlessness, that gives her the power she holds over the viewer?’ She doesn’t look especially weak does she? Where there is beauty there is often danger – where there is power there is seduction. Beauty, danger, power, and seduction are the stuff of Newton’s images and all of these can be disturbing. A fundamentally important aspect of Newton’s photographs is that they can disturb and appeal at the same time. Newton forces the viewer to admit that if Cyberwoman 7 is my fantasy then my fantasy may have more power over me than I do over it. Cyberwoman is no Betty Paige.

We also need to keep in mind of course that to record the images of a dream world with photography (or a pencil, oil paint, or film) is to make a representation. The maker of the image does not necessarily wish to see the characters of the dream world assume a reality beyond the image. Making an image is not a way of saying “I am in favour” of what is represented – indeed, the opposite may be the case. This basic level of subtlety is too difficult it seems for some interpreters of images among them I would rank most of Newton’s harsher critics. Newton should be praised rather than condemned for asking us to face up to our own surreal world’s and encouraging us to understand them. Newton’s image of a woman sitting on her bed, with a gun in her mouth, is of course not an image promoting suicide. It is rather, a way of forcing us to look at the woman and wonder what has led her to this moment. I do not find it to be an unsympathetic image. The “gun” of course is a cigarette lighter (Newton, 2002:289).

 

Newton is part of a photographic lineage that includes Edward Steichen, Horst P. Horst, Man Ray, Fran Drtikol, Irving Penn, Minor White, Edward Weston, Paul Outerbridge, and Richard Avedon. Like these other interesting and provocative image makers Newton has not been without his own influence on photography.

 

V. Influence

To understand Newton’s influence we need only look at the way in which the nude female has recently changed in photographic image making. This subject, once abandoned to the pornographer, has been reclaimed by Newton and many of those he has influenced. Precisely at the time when photography was undergoing the early torments of digitalization and computer manipulation Newton encouraged straight photographic shooting of his subjects. Image makers such as Bettina Rheims have been very much influenced by Newton as have many female fashion photographers commanding traditional technologies.
 

In one case, Ellen von Unwerth, we see a woman who once appeared before Newton’s lens emerge as a leading photographer in her own right. Von Unwerth
and an entire generation learned from Newton how to stop us in our tracks with an image. As a photographer she takes great pleasure in using fantasy to subvert traditional gender roles. We cannot underestimate the liberating effect that Newton’s images had on many younger image makers, especially women like Rheims and von Unwerth. Very much because of Newton and his reclaiming of the female nude from the realm of the pornographer, and his insertion of it into the mainstream, image makers like Rheims and von Unwerth can push the boundaries of not only the nude female, but the nude male as well. In our era of poly-sexuality these image makers play a vital role in the reassessment of our most cherished assumptions about the human form in pictorial representation. Have you noticed that since Newton, we also see publishers more willing to reproduce the images of Paul Outerbridge, Minor White, Imogen Cunningham, and Edward Weston, and a greater willingness among bookstores to bring these books down from the top shelves. Newton however did nothing to liberate our view of the nude male and this is an area where much remains to be accomplished today. That said, more images of the nude male are finding their way into photography collections and publications through the work of women such as Elleyna Martyniuk. Helmut Newton (alongside of Robert Mapplethorpe) seems to have provided a very strong push in helping us to come to terms with the human form.

 

VIII. Conclusion

“Not that I ever consider what will excite the public. If I were to do that I would never take a picture. No I just please myself” (Newton, 2002:241).

Many, when they first saw Saddle I (1976) exclaimed: “you have got to be kidding!” Of course Newton was kidding. It was taken during a fashion shoot for leather goods in which the models wore many items of apparel until the end when Newton decided one should don the saddle. I like this image because it shows us a photograph that might not have appeared to be so outlandish just a century ago. In its own disturbing way this image, perhaps more than any other of Newton’s, forces us to realize just how unthinkable it is to take such an image seriously. Unfortunately a lot of well intentioned feminists haven’t realized yet that this photo is a joke only on those who believe it to be a serious image. This image has exposed the fact that some traditionally minded feminists thrive on images like this – they need images like it to feel good a about their politics of dispossession. Today, however, many young feminists seek a politics of attainment .

J.G. Ballard said that Newton was “the world’s greatest visual artist” (in Eyestorm.com, 2009). I am not certain I would go that far, but he certainly was among them and for me the top photographer of women at the close of the millennium. Among his accomplishments was helping us to begin to think through what is necessary to continue to liberate the female nude photograph from the territory of the pornographer.

Helmut Newton was always a little awkward and he preferred to keep his camera between himself and the world. He had an amazing eye for light and shadow (is photography any else?) and a remarkable sense of timing and humour. He understood the Zeitgeist as well as anyone and he resisted greatly its further dumbing down. In the era of the screen, images have become increasingly banal, and we have been immersed in billions of low quality images. Helmut Newton is among a few image makers who understood that certain images, of the highest quality, have the power to arrest, and to promote an admiration for quality image making. His gift was the ability to imagine incredible and thought provoking images and to manifest them in photographs. The rest is up to us as readers.

I wonder if his critics realize how much more image impoverished our culture would be had there not been a Helmut Newton? In him, as in so many other great image makers, we find an old and dependable lesson: It is very important not to be liked by everyone.

 

 

References

Lindsay Baker (2001). “Helmut Newton: A Perverse Romantic”. The Guardian (May 5): http://www.guardina.co.uk/lifesandstyle/2001/may/05/weekend.lindsaybaker

Gerry Coulter (2008). Kees van Dongen and the Power of Seduction. Euro Art Magazine Spring): http://www.euroartmagazine.com/new/?issue=13=1&content=156

Eyestorm.com (2009). “Artist Profile: Helmut Newton”. http://www.eyestorm.com/artists/profile/Helmut_Newton_biography.html

Helmut Newton (2000). Work. Köln: Taschen.

Helmut Newton (2002) Helmut Newton: Autobiography. New York: Doubleday.

Karl Ruhrburg (1998). Art of the Twentieth Century (in two volumes). Köln: Taschen.

Suzy Menkes (2004). “Obituary: Helmut Newton, master of the perverse image”. New York Times (January 26): http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/26/news/26iht-obits_ed3_23.html

Sean O’Hagen (2005). “The King of Kinky”. The Guardian (August 7): http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2005/aug/07/photography.art