#HELMUT NEWTON NUDES ARCHIVE#

Considering his career was built around taking photos of naked women often a fraction of his age (and revealing his obvious kinks in the process), the remarkable nature of their 56-year marriage only adds more depth to an already fascinating story. Most importantly, June, who become a respected photographer in her own right under the pseudonym Alice Springs, is given her own voice within the context of his work and life. He photographed men (often, as a story about his portrait of French fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen reveals, as the butt of an elaborate joke), but it was women who were his obsession – and they rightly get their response.

#HELMUT NEWTON NUDES ARCHIVE#

The most intriguing decision that von Boehm makes is that Newton's is the only man's voice here, in snippets of archive footage and a handful of interviews before his death. 'He was a little bit pervert, but so am I, so it's OK,' Grace Jones giggles with a leer as she recalls the man who called himself Wintour's 'favorite naughty boy.' It was that distancing that caused Susan Sontag (among others) to dub him a misogynist, but the women that worked with him see a different side. For some, such as Marianne Faithfull, they found a new part of themselves that they could reveal others, like Claudia Schiffer, look back on him with unexpected fondness for the distance he put between their real selves and the image. It's clear throughout that Newton was having a whale of a time creating his images – little saucy slices of Hollywood noir, all poolside voyeurism and hotel encounters – and convincing some of the world's most beautiful women to disrobe in front of him. He was the fashion photographer fundamentally disinterested in fashion, whose aesthetic happened to coincide with the look that designers like Karl Largerfeld and Ralph Lauren craved and sold.

His glamazons were sculpted, sexual, enigmatic, daring, romantic, erotic, subversive. His look, as explained by Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour (one of a host of talking heads featured here among the archive footage), was instantly recognizable and shaped how haute couture appeared in 1980s glossy fashion magazines: Bold colors or stark black-and-whites, with infinite depth of field, populated by statuesque women perched somewhere between strength and peril. What's left to say, except to mention and mourn his 2004 death – oddly fitting for the master of menace and glamour, as Newton smashed his car into a wall on Sunset Strip, coming out of the legendary home of LA celebrity hedonism, the Chateau Marmont. This would be a double-dog-dare as Newton's wife, June Browne, had already given her husband the most intimate portrait in her 1994 video profile, Helmut With June.

It's not hard to imagine that documentarian Gero von Boehm would see that as the ultimate challenge, having already said as much as there was to say about a host of dissident and transgressive talents – American novelists like Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, and Henry Miller, and French photographer Bettina Rheims. 'Most photographers are terribly boring people,' he said, 'and the films of photographers that I have seen are terribly boring.' Helmut Newton would have despised the idea of a documentary of his life.

Helmut newton nudes