The Man Who Gave Us Dirty Swank

By Richard Lacayo Monday, Sept. 15, 2003
    • Alexander Liberman, the legendary art director of Vogue, once put it this way: "A fashion photograph is not a photograph of a dress; it is a photograph of a woman." That's not the half of it. Like a building, even a bad one, a fashion photograph is the picture of an age, full of signposts to whatever spirits are at large. You sense that right away in just about any picture by Helmut Newton, photographer of consequence, full-time provocateur, dirty old man. In the 1970s Newton became famous with fashion shots that introduced to the pages of Vogue the black leather of European decadence. (This was before Robert Mapplethorpe showed us that dog collars were as American as Rin Tin Tin.) It was a moment of witchy aftershocks from the '60s, when the energies of liberation had moved on to less wholesome destinations. Instead of pot, cocaine; instead of Joan Baez, Patty Hearst. Newton plunged into this atmosphere with pictures of deluxe women in bondage gear and lesbian lip locks. They pinned men to the ground, wrestled each other and glared at us from couches in the best hotels, sometimes baring their breasts and (implicitly) their fangs.

    For sheer lubricious swank, Newton was hard to beat. Fashion magazines like to be chic, which means edgy but not indigestible. Almost everything Newton did was hard to swallow. He was one of the first to inject certain strange particles into the mainstream. He made pictures that proposed domination as an excellent metaphor for human affairs, or same-sex involvements as a supremely interesting annex to the general run of things. When Madonna kisses Britney Spears at the MTV Video Music Awards, his spirit hovers in the air.


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    Now we have his Autobiography (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday; 289 pages), an artless but entertaining memoir, the story of a man, now 82, who says his father once warned him, "My boy, you'll end up in the gutter. All you think of is girls and photos." Where he ended up instead was Monte Carlo, with stops in London, Paris and Hollywood. He lived a life on the move, first as a young Jew fleeing from Hitler all the way to Australia, then as an ambitious photographer making his way back to the centers of the universe. His parents and brother escaped to Argentina with their lives and not much else. But Newton insists that once he was set loose on the world, he was always having a high time of it, a refugee libido forever being washed ashore into the arms of Mary or Dora or Louise.

    Behind this book stand three centuries of the libertine memoir, including Casanova's Journal and the ribald passages of Boswell's. It's harder to play the lewd rascal these days without looking silly, what with 12-year-olds adding spaghetti straps to their back-to-school wardrobe, but Newton does it amusingly. As he capers from Singapore to Melbourne to London, we get glimpses of Anita, who couldn't have sex until handkerchiefs were hung over the saints' pictures in her bedroom, and Josette, who left lipstick smears across his white linen shorts. "Josette was unwilling to terminate our affair," he tells us. "I was too good in bed. Our sex wasn't joyous, it was steamy--'schwul.'"

    In Australia he meets his enduring wife June, a nice-looking woman who must also be an awfully good sport. It was there in 1956 that he was discovered by Vogue and then whisked off to London and larger things. But it's at this very point, when he takes up the work that made him famous, that his book tapers off. What did he bring to it from his childhood in Isherwood's Berlin or his flight from Hitler's? He doesn't say.

    Maybe we can. Looked at now, his pictures seem like late aftershocks of fascism. They just happened to blow up in the pages of Vogue . Newton's memoir all but laughs off the worst of Nazism, but leaf through his saw-toothed magazine work or climb the barbed wire of White Women , his first, unforgettable photo book, and you find yourself remembering what D.H. Lawrence said of Herman Melville: "Choosingly, he was looking for paradise. Unchoosingly, he was mad with hatred of the world." The Helmut Newton we meet in Autobiography is the one looking for paradise, the man on the make, the guy Hitler never laid a glove on. And the turbulent man we meet in his pictures? We may have our suspicions, but when it comes to the hard edges of his own life, Newton's focus goes soft.