The Helmut Newton Foundation, Berlin, is holding a new exhibition dedicated to Newton’s first three legendary publications: White Women (1976) Sleepless Nights (1978) and Big Nudes (1981). These photographs, oscillating between fashion and nude photography, were never displayed together. Explored side-by-side, these photographs mark three milestones in Helmut Newton’s career and trace its unmistakeable effect on the worlds of fashion and photography.
His first book, White Women, was published when Newton was already 56 years old, in 1976. The book received the Kodak Photobook Award shortly thereafter and was reprinted numerous times since. In this collection, Newton used nudity within the visual world of fashion – an unusual take that both astonished and provoked the fashion world but, above all, revolutionized fashion photography. Newton’s photographs both reflect and comment on the transformation of the role of women in western society at the time. But most characteristically, Newton turns the viewers into voyeurs.
The book Sleepless Nights brought together photographs previously published in various magazines. Here, for the first time, Newton started working with a visual language that would later become iconic to him: female models in orthopaedic body braces or wearing leather saddles by Hermès, and the so-called “dummies” – mannequins shown in amorous situations with a person. Indeed, fashion often seemed to serve as an excuse for Newton to realise something different and very individual.
But it was with his third publication Big Nudes that Newton had secured his status in the world of photography. Soon after their creation the monumental pictures were shown in various museums; with his Big Nudes and the subsequent life-sized images from his Naked and Dressed series, Newton had opened up a new dimension of the photographic human image.