A Caruña
CNN
—
Helmut Newton, the German post-war fashion photographer who notoriously posed a model on a bed in a Paris hotel with a saddle on her back, is the focus of a new retrospective in the port city of A Caruña in Galicia, Spain. Counter intuitively, it is a sophisticated showcase of female empowerment as much as erotic suggestion. Stockings, suspenders, jodhpurs and leathers are all worn without apology.
Staged at the city’s Marta Ortega Pérez (MOP) Foundation, “Helmut Newton – Fact & Fiction” explores a career spent shooting for magazines such as Vogue, Playboy and Harper’s Bazaar from the 1950s through to the early 2000s, as well as a mercurial character that fused together playfulness and angst.
A Newton picture can be many things at once: provocative, titillating even, but also amusing and confusing. His iconic ‘Big Nudes’ prints from 1980 are larger-than-life-size and full frontal. Yet, his nudes exude armor. His celebrity portraits framed actresses — from Raquel Welch to Charlotte Rampling — in challenging stances. And in the 1970s, photographing with carte blanche for Vogue France, he invented a bold monochrome visual language — black lingerie, insouciant countenance, power plays and decadent interiors — that has been widely imitated in the years since.
The heavy contrasts in his work were echoed in the reversal of fortunes in his life story. He was born Helmut Neustädter in 1920 in Berlin into a family of Jewish industrialists. Fleeing the Nazis in the late 1930s, he was exiled first to Singapore and then Australia. One of his early models, the Australian actress June Browne, became his wife in 1948. Browne was the template for his later models — striking and intelligent — and, working under the name Alice Springs, had a successful photographic career of her own….
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