Sounding like a former smoker, Newton says, "I now have a strong reaction against the exposed female body. Nudes will no longer be a subject for me -- though I might regret saying that the next time I see a beautiful girl on the beach." After interrupting himself briefly to address his assistant in excellent French, he continues, "Today I have a strong desire to photograph women clothed from head-to-foot with hardly an inch of flesh. It will be a challenge to work under such restraints." Helmut Newton, page 2
Newton moves away from the balcony to a far corner of his living room and opens a door leading into
a two-room office which looks beyond Karl Lagerfeld's villa "La Vigie" and the Monte-Carlo Sporting Club to the Mediterranean Sea. Amid the Memphis-style contemporary furniture and photos of Newton with his wife is an inflatable doll still stuffed in her cardboard box. On one window sill are a pair of handcuffs given to Newton by a policeman.
Newton and his Australian-born wife June, who married Helmut on May 13, 1948 and assumed the nom de plume Alice Springs when she began her own photographic career 25 years ago, have lived at 7 avenue Saint-Roman in Monte-Carlo since 1981. He calls her "Pussy" or "Junie"; she calls him "Helmie" or "Hel."
"I certainly wasn't devastated when Helmie made the sudden decision to quit shooting nudes," June admits. "Like many of his decisions, it really was very sudden. He just decided one day to stop doing nudes and that was that. But he's always photographed whatever he wanted to despite what I thought."
June says her husband's controversial images, which sometimes presented dressed men dominating naked and subservient women, never bothered her.
"Helmie is nothing like his work," June continued. "That's another side, the dark side. I don't know anything about that. With me, he is never suspicious and always extremely sensual."
Newton says that his work with nudes served to liberate him. "The point of my photography has always been to challenge myself, to go a little further than my Germanic discipline and Teutonic nature would traditionally permit me to," he says, as he walks by blow-ups from the "Big Nudes" series which line his office. "The nudes and bondage shots were my way of going beyond my own bounds. Now that I've done that, I want to return to fashion with a fresh and mature eye and do more portraits.
"Women assume marvelous expressions when they look at themselves," Newton explains. "They lose themselves in their own image. It's fascinating to observe and shoot. It really inspires me physically and mentally."
Besides self-portraits, Newton has shot only one nude man -- actor Helmut Berger, standing before a mirrored fireplace admiring his reflection in 1984. "I was never interested in naked men," he remarks. "I've done quite a lot of nudes of myself. When I'm in a hotel room and bored I'll get a camera and shoot myself in the mirror. But I haven't shown many and I'm getting a bit old for that."
Yet whether his subject is man or woman, clothed or unclothed, Newton's forte is his role as the grand seducer. "My job as a portrait photographer is to seduce, amuse and entertain," explains Newton, whose most recently "seduced" subjects include Monaco's Princess Caroline and female cabinet ministers in the French government. "Most of my work is meant to be funny. Because I'm quite timid myself, I try to determine whether my subject will be receptive to a wild idea before I suggest anything. I would never force anybody to do anything. I never push very far. I think subjects pose so openly for me because I inspire confidence or because I'm older than most of them."
While he has sworn off flesh, the photographer will occasionally reminisce by taking a look at one of his "Big Nudes" on the office wall or flipping through an old book of bondage photos. But he says he doesn't get excited.
"The photographs don't arouse me," he concludes as he shows a visitor to the elevator. "All I can think about is the hard work it took to make them. Look, I'm not an intellectual -- I just take pictures."
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