Delve Into Helmut Newton's Printed Paean to the Female Form

“It began when I was so ill that there was a good chance of dying,” Helmut Newton once said of his bold approach to photographing fashion. “I promised myself that if I survived I would never again pander to a magazine's requests or follow the ideas of art directors. I would only make images which were personal, which arose out of my own life.” Fortunately for the prolific photographer, his ‘personal’ perspective was more vivacious, dynamic and dripping in sensuality than any single art director could ever wish for. Over his 42-year career in magazines, Newton redefined what fashion photography could accomplish – as Taschen’s weighty new tome, Helmut Newton: Pages From the Glossies, proudly attests.

Page From the Glossies traces Newton’s career from his very first ventures for the likes of the French and British Vogue magazines and Queen in the late 1950s, all the way through to the final editorials in the late 1990s – those which dripped with an end-of-the-century sensuality, boasting full, vivacious colour and wide expanses of golden skin. Perhaps even more precious than the full double page spreads that can be found on every turn of the page, however, are the original quotations from the photographer, who died in a car accident related to heart problems in 2004, which are scattered liberally throughout. From an unconcerned meditation on the outrage that his heavily provocative American Vogue editorial, 'The Story of Ohhhh' prompted in 1975 – “The readers were deeply shocked by what they saw and I was accused in the press of showing bestiality and advocating sexual relationships between two women and one man,” he reflects in the book. “This was the beginning of my notoriety and I never looked back” – through to hilarious insights into one 1984 American Vogue feature starring Daryl Hannah and a baby who screamed every time she approached, they provide a fascinating and rarely heard commentary. For a man whose most sensual desires and inherent urge to provoke were conveyed through visually, his words, too, are utterly compelling. “During my whole life as a photographer the printed page was my dynamo,” he states in the foreword, revealing the source of his prolific and boundary-pushing output. “I realised very early on that the most important factor would be to be published, with a by-line, and that to me was much more important than the money people would pay me for my pictures.”

The book’s primary focus is on the typography and layouts of the pages which held Newton’s era-defining work – and as such, it spans almost half a century of history seen through the slow evolution of magazine design. No matter how slow to change the pages which featured him were, however, Newton’s photographs themselves were incandescent with novelty. In the early 1970s he built a photo-machine which allowed his models to take self-portraits even as they posed, the racy results of which were subsequently published. In the 1980s, he photographed two fully clothed women standing poolside surrounded by gleaming male Adonises as they admired their own physiques, in a stark and forward-thinking reversal of gender stereotypes. From 1987 to 1994, he backed away from fashion photography entirely, shunning it in favour of travelling to far-off places to shoot portraits of politicians, actors and people of interest for Vanity Fair and Conde Nast Traveler. In short, nothing and nobody could second guess the photographer, whose every move seemed to leave a generation of copycats following dubiously in his wake.

These days, even his name itself has become synonymous with a larger-than-life, technicolour sensuality, the adjective 'Newtonian' now used to indicate a proud and provocative celebration of the female physique. Rest assured that Taschen's newest offering, which contains more than 500 pages from an initial selection of over 3000 from the photographer's archives, makes for a scintillating tour of fashion photography's recent history.

Helmut Newton: Pages From the Glossies is out now, published by Taschen.