Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful - a snapshot of maybe-misogynist, provocative fashion photography
By Karen Gordon
Rating: B-plus
How would the legendary photographer Helmut Newton have fared in the era of cancel culture? It’s a question I found myself coming back to while watching the probing new documentary Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful.
Newton’s fashion images, bold, unconventional and frequently erotic, were mainstays of Vogue magazine, for decades. Editor Anna Wintour was a champion of his work.
Helmut Newton shot of David Lynch and Isabella Rossellini
But even in more liberal eras, his work was controversial. Did his images idealize women, as strong, defiantly in control of their bodies and sexuality? Did he objectify them? Could it have been both?
The documentary, directed by Gero von Boehm, does two things at the same time. It looks at the attitudes of the late photographer and what influenced him. And it also asks some of his champions, like Wintour, and some of the most famous models and actresses who worked with him, to grapple with what Newton was doing.
We’ll never get to hear what Newton’s perspective would be today. He died in a car crash in 2004, but by then Von Boehm had already started doing interviews with his subject.
He filled in the rest of the story by, among other things, using videos and images shot by Newton’s wife June, also a photographer, who uses the name Alice Springs professionally. She also appears in the documentary as well, filling in some of the blanks, talking about points in their life where life and work intersected.
Newton, who was Jewish, fled from Nazi Germany in the late ‘30s, but not before absorbing the influences of two photographers, both women, whose lives took completely different turns. One was a pioneering fashion photographer, Yva, a Jewish-German woman who died in a concentration camp in 1942. He was also affected by the images of Leni Riefenshtal, who served the Nazi cause with her strikingly powerful architectural images, particularly of men.
Helmut Newton self-portrait
He ultimately landed in Australia, where he met June and began doing commercial and fashion photography, and from there ended up launching his fashion career.
The film portrays the artist as a man with a singular vision, and with a sense of mischief and humour, especially when it came to politics. When asked to photograph Jean-Marie Le Pen, the French extreme right wing National Front, he photographs him with his dogs, in a shot that echoes a picture of Adolf Hitler. In another assignment for French Vogue he shoots images of expensive jewelry on the hands of a woman cutting up chickens.
But the bulk of the film deals with his fashion work, and the way he portrayed women.
To get a perspective on the work, Von Boehm turned to some of the models Newton worked with most frequently, including Grace Jones, Nadja Auerman, Charlotte Rampling, Claudia Schiffer, Hanna Schygulla and Isabella Rossellini.
A few of them had never posed in the nude before and trusted him, seeing him as a story teller.
Singer Grace Jones who saw his work outré, but never vulgar. “He was a little bit pervert, but it’s okay, so was I.”
Isabella Rossellini said you had to understand he wasn’t photographing you, but rather an idea, “So you have to make yourself available, or say no.”
She also intriguingly muses about whether his fashion images that veered into S&M were also him expressing anger at women. The late Susan Sontag challenged him on TV about his assertion that he loved women, suggesting that loving women and being a misogynist were not incompatible.
But perhaps the most intriguing point of view comes from Vogue’s formidable driving force Wintour, who hired him frequently in spite of the controversies. She describes his work as “necessary,” even if it “sometimes upsets people,” and celebrates the role his tough images had in a magazine devoted to beautiful images.
Would his work, or any work that walks the line the way his does, be tolerated today?
It’s not explicitly in this documentary, but perhaps something worth asking after watching a film about an artist who experienced fascism first-hand.
Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful. Directed by Gero Von Boehm. Starring Helmut Newton, Anna Wintour, Isabella Rossellini. Begins streaming Thursday, July 23 via virtual cinemas in Toronto (Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema); Montreal (Cinema Moderne); Vancouver (Vancity); and Hamilton (Art Gallery of Hamilton).