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History of Photography
Introduction
History of Photography
A World History of Photography
The Story Behind the Pictures 1827-1991
Photographers' Dictionary


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THE STORY BEHIND THE PICTURES 1827-1991
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1 Nicephore Niepce. View from the Study Window, 1827
2 Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre. Boulevard du Temple, 1838
3 Eugene Durieu/Eugene Delacroix. Nude from Behind, ca. 1853
4 Duchenne de Boulogne. Contractions musculaires, 1856
5 Auguste Rosalie Bisson. The Ascent of Mont Blanc, 1862
6 Nadar. Sarah Bernhardt, ca. 1864
7 Francois Aubert. Emperor Maximilian's Shirt, 1867
8 Andre Adolphe Eugene Disderi. Dead Communards, 1871
9 Maurice Guibert. Toulouse-Lautrec in His Studio, ca. 1894
10 Max Priester/Willy Wilcke. Bismarck on his Deathbed, 1898
11 Heinrich Zille. The Wood Gatherers, 1898
12 Alfred Stieglitz. The Steerage, 1907
13 Lewis Hine. Girl Worker in a Carolina Cotton Mill, 1908
14 August Sander. Young Farmers, 1914
15 Paul Strand. Blind Woman, 1916
16 Man Ray. Noire et blanche, 1926
17 Andre Kertesz. Meudon, 1928
18 Robert Capa. Spanish Loyalist, 1936
19 Dorothea Lange. Migrant Mother,
Nipomo, California, 1936
20 Horst P. Horst. Mainbocher Corset, 1939
21 Henri Cartier-Bresson. Germany, 1945
22 Richard Petersen. View from the Dresden City Hall Tower, 1945
23 Robert Doisneau. The Kiss in Front of City Hall, 1950
24 Dennis Stock. James Dean on Times Square, 1955
25 Bert Stern. Marilyn's Last Sitting, 1962
26 Gerard Malanga. Andy Warhol and The Velvet Underground, 1966
27 Helmut Newton. They're Coming!,
1981
28 Sandy Skoglund. Revenge of the Goldfish, 1981
29 Robert Mapplethorpe. Lisa Lyon, 1982
30 Joel-Peter Witkin. Un Santo Oscuro, 1987
31 Sebastiao Salgado. Kuwait, 1991
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see also:
Newton Helmut
Chapter 27 (part I)
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1981
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Newton
Helmut
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They're Coming!
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Ice-Cold
Self-
Consciousness
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The photograph marked
a turning point - and it was, of course, intended to be provocative. In
fact, not until 1981 did the French Vogue feel ready to publish Helmut
Newton's diptych Sie kommen! as an erotic metaphor for the changing
image of woman.
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This time there were no Italian
gardens or fin-de-siecle hotel rooms, no beaches on the Cote d'Azur, no
promenades, no New York apartments with a view, or well-appointed rooms in
the 16th Arrondissement. In their place, only the sober, empty chamber of
a professional studio. That was unusual for Helmut Newton, who loved to
stage scenes, especially in settings that exuded life and vitality for at
least he did at one time). His photographs, which many believe to have
been schooled in the German cinema between the wars, were sometimes set
even on bridges or in underground passageways, in train stations or
airports. It all depended on what Newton's fat notebook - that
irreplaceable store room bursting with ideas that have feasted on reality
- proposed. Newton was a realist - if one accepts the idea that dreams,
desires, and fantasies also belong to the inventory of reality. But his
inventory had one important difference from the world of things that
surround us: namely, one does not need a drawer for them. Helmut Newton
provided images for those forces that move the world beneath the skin, as
it were - our collective passions, fantasies, suppressed desires, and
sublime wishes. And he did this not for the sake of the public, but for
his own sake. If he had concerned himself about what the public might
like, he would never have created an-other picture, he said. "No, I do
only what pleases me." Helmut Newton was a gardener of our secret desires.
And without doubt, he was the best-known gardener of the kind, and was
therefore automatically the most controversial botanist of our collective
longings. He was a latter-day pupil of Freud, whose medium was of course
not the couch, but the camera. Whether small format or 6 x 6-inch, whether
ring flash or daylight -technical data are of little help in mapping the
rich idea-landscape of a Helmut Newton. He created a cosmos enclosed
within itself, subject to its own rules, which Newton, with his aversion
to all theories, never attempted to organize into a program, but which
nonetheless allow themselves to be distilled in retrospect. Newton's "film
stills", his frozen scenes, are clearly artificial, but at the same time
thoroughly consistent with the interior world created by the photographer;
the scenes revolve around power and submission, around force and passion,
seduction, pleasure, and physical love. His arrangement of his realm is
unmistakably vertical: there is no sense of egalitarian togetherness among
his figures, but rather clear hierarchies of power, although - and we will
return to this point later - the woman is clearly given the determining
role. Boots and whips, saddles and spurs, German shepherds, chains, high
heels, are recurring symbols in a complex system of visual symbols set
always against mirrors and broad corridors, stairs and balconies that rise
to dizzying heights, swimming pools and bridge railings: in other words,
flight and fall, plummeting and death are always at least implicated in
Newton's pictorial world.
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Helmut Newton
They're Coming!
1981
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Fashion as an excuse for
something else
Helmut Newton loved to arrange
scenes and thus to achieve absolute control over his picture. Moreover,
the writer Michael Stoeber finds this to have been a tendency throughout
the artist's life. Anyone who, like Newton, has been cheated out of a life
plan - however it may be defined - in the course of time compensates for
the loss if possible by searching for some form of "absolute control over
his own life." Born the son of a Berlin button-factory owner in 1920,
Newton left - that is, felt compelled to leave - Germany at age eighteen.
His decision proved correct, as the fate of his photography teacher Yva in
Auschwitz demonstrates, even though both his journey to Australia and his
entry into the field of professional photography were difficult. In the
early 1960s, Newton returned to Europe, where he found a congenial
platform for his work, particularly with the French Vogue under its
courageous editor-in-chief, Francine Crescent. Note well: at this point in
time, moral boundaries were still quite narrow. Nevertheless, the
unmistakable signs of change were beginning to emerge - at first
(cautiously) in Ed van der Eisken's volume of photography, Love in Saint
Cermain-des-Pres, in 1956, and later (openly) in the much-cited 'sexual
revolution1 around 1968. In a certain sense, Helmut Newton was, or became,
a part of this movement. On the one hand, he and the pictorial world he
created profited from the increasingly liberal morality of the age. On the
other hand, his constant exploration of the possibilities also led to an
expansion of the limits of tolerance. Newton thus simultaneously
functioned as a catalyzer and an exploiter of the development.
Helmut Newton was a fashion
photographer - and nothing less than that. He photographed clothes or, as
one calls them in the industry, 'collections'. The cut or the fabrics -
the 'buttons and bows' in the language of the fashion editors - interested
him only peripherally, however. For Newton, fashion was rather a pretext
for something else, although - and this makes his work easier - the path
from fashion to his passion was not a long one, when one recalls that
fashion, in the sense of the age-old game of revealing and concealing,
lies also at the core of all sensuality. Newton's visualizations may have
been connected with a contract, but they are nonetheless steeped in his
personal desires, wishes and dreams, delights and fears. Furthermore, his
success only goes to show that his photographs touch the depths of
collective longings. Newton translated into pictures that which many
hardly dare to think.
The voice whispering to Newton was
that of reality. He loaded his creative batteries, so to speak, from
everyday life. The artist always insisted that he was little more than a
voyeur, a claim which coquettishly borders on understatement, but
nonetheless reveals the conceptual core of his photographic work - an art,
moreover, which is schooled in life at its fullest, gaudiest, and most
pleasurable, or conversely when it radiates on lighter and softer
frequencies. Newton's powers of perception were both alert and selective:
the "bad boy of photography," as he liked to call himself, picked up the
lascivious signals that he then translated into pictures that succeed in
being provocative even in an age that is largely without taboos. "I am,"
as Helmut Newton pointed out, "a good observer of people." That is, he was
a seismographer of those waves which people - preferably "cool girls" -
emit through gestures, glances, their way of walking, or even their
clothing. The street was the costume room for his pictorial ideas,
enriched through a bit of haute-vole that transcends the trivial and
passes into the fabulous. "The people in my pictures," according to Helmut
Newton, who did not at all attempt to hide the parameters of his
creations, "have been 'arranged', as on a stage. Nonetheless my pictures
are not counterfeit; they reflect what I see in life with my own eyes." In
this connection, Newton liked to refer to a photograph titled Eiffel Tower
(1974), initially published in White Women - Newton's first book, which
was particularly important in laying the groundwork for the later eception
of his photographs. "Tower" is a late-evening view into the rear seat of a
limousine that has been transformed into a 'bedroom'. A beautiful young
blonde woman is lounging In the midst of the black leather cushions; apart
from her leather jacket, which is already pulled open, she is wearing only
transparent undies embroidered with an Eiffel Tower -images that sing of
Helmut Newton's penchant for double meanings and ambiguity, in the words
of Klaus Honnef. In the background, an anonymous man has begun to work on
her, fumbling with the zipper and helping her out of her high-heeled
boots. "The scene," according to Newton, "undoubtedly takes place after
work - a business man has a date with his girl friend. He is wearing a
blue suit, handsome cufflinks, and drives a black Citroen DS - the typical
auto of the bourgeoisie and of civil servants in France. Lying on the seat
next to the woman is a copy of the establishment newspaper Le Monde. And
what the man is doing before he drives home - he has not yet gotten to the
stage of going to a hotel with his girlfriend - is undressing her in the
automobile. That hap-pens all day long in the Bois de Boulogne," explained
Helmut Newton; "the autos are lined up as in an American lover's lane."
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Helmut Newton
They're Coming! (naked), 1981.
The shot unquestionably ranks among Newton's best known imagesfwm the
eighties.
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Basso continuo to his
performance with the camera
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Helmut Newton was fascinated by
the idea that hiding under every woman in 'full dress' is a more (or less)
well-formed body. Fashion was the theater curtain that must be pulled
aside. And possibly - no, certainly - this nakedness, this ceremony,
remained something of a basso continuo to his performance with the camera.
Already in the mid-1970s, Newton started photographing girls in the Paris
Metro: stark naked under a fur coat. An undertaking not entirely without
danger, as the photographer admitted. "You can land in jail for something
like that, because the Metro has very strict rules." But Newton loved to
test the borders of the possible, in daily life as in art - which for him
in any case flowed together. That these borders have clearly moved since
the 1970s has a good deal to do with Newton himself, as mentioned earlier.
Opening the curtain slowly, Newton radically altered our idea of what is
allowed and what is forbidden. At the end of this process of development,
his models were completely naked - without coat or furs - provided at most
with the black stilettos that are a staple of his iconography: "When I
look at a woman," said Newton, "my first glance goes to her shoes and I
hope that they are high. High heels make a woman very sexy and give her
something threatening."
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"Beaute -Silhouette 82": double-page spreac French Vogue, November 1981,
W. the first publicatior the motif now com monly known as They're
Coming!
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An increasing obsession
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Helmut Newton was an artist whose
work has found its way into the sacred halls of international art museums
- which is all the more surprising considering that most of his
photographs have a commercial back-ground, and that he did not at all
attempt to hide his origins in editing and advertising. Newton succeeded
in blurring the distinction between 'free' and 'applied' art for us - just
as he himself never took the border seriously. "Whenever I've worked on a
commission, whether editorial or advertising, I have always found my
inspiration," he admitted. "Not all, but almost all of my best photographs
stem from these assignments." Newton's ideas, as Sotheby curator Philippe
Garner once noted, were elaborate; they demanded the noblest raw materials
and masterly skill from experts - makeup artists, hairdressers, stylists.
Newton, in other words, needs a 'back office' that could be offered only
by large newspapers and publishing houses, with all the logistic and
financial support they provide. Therefore, the humus from which his work
grew was the commission - even if not everything thrived in this soil, at
least not in the early years. This was a situation that bothered Newton,
at least in the official legend. "A dream of a contract," the photographer
recalled; "I'm supposed to take photographs in this grand hotel for the
magazine Realties. I've got two interesting models, but I've also got a
problem: my first book, White Women, is almost done - just a few pictures
are missing. For the book, the pictures should be rather bold nudes, but
for Realties, 1 need elegant photos to fit in with the character of the
magazine. I decided to make two versions: one nude, the other clothed."
From then on, Newton admitted, his interest in the opposition between
'naked' and 'dressed' developed more and more into a passion. They're
Coming! was published for the first time in the November issue of the
French Vogue, and represented naturally the high point, and even in a
sense the crowning moment, of a passion which seemed hardly capable of
being carried any further. The editor-in-chief Francine Crescent devoted a
bold eight pages to Newton's series, a decision which, as Karl Lagerfeld
recalls, "placed her job at risk" once again. Admittedly, complete
nakedness combined with stilettos is almost part of the basic vocabulary
of Newtonian photographic art; one needs only think of Rue Aubriot (1975)
or Mannequins quai d'Orsay II from Newton's second book, Sleepless Nights,
which twice took up the opposition between 'naked' and 'dressed' (not to
mention the artist's explorations of lesbian love, a theme which always
intrigued the photographer}. But the one picture was taken under
protection of darkness, so to speak, and the other in the seclusion of a
salon. Both photographs therefore exude something of an intimacy that
Newton's pictorial vision clearly passed beyond -from his Big Nudes to the
sequence discussed here. The title They're Coming! - applied to the
photographs only after their appearance in Vogue - underlines the
resolution behind a nudity that is now 'worn' as a matter of course, but
which also and especially signifies vulnerability. Seen in this way,
Newton's women of the 1980s are "big nudes" in a double sense: large,
strong, goal-oriented, and - whether 'dressed up' or unclothed - ready to
conquer the world of men.
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A horror of too much
smoothness, too much perfection
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The idea of dissolving the
opposition between 'naked' and 'clothed' in diptychs is one Newton had
already experimented with earlier in Brescia during the summer of 1981, in
a sea-side Fascist-style villa. "The same situation, the same woman,"
recalled Karl Lagerfeld; "once dressed and once naked (but with high heels
- for Newton, a woman isn't naked unless she's wearing high heels). The
reconstruction is perfect; only one thing could not be replicated - the
light. The sun had changed, and the unique hours were gone forever."
Helmut Newton learned from his work in northern Italy; afterwards, he
exchanged the admittedly charming ambiance of a summer villa for the
antiseptic atmosphere of a Paris studio. The single model furthermore gave
way to a group of well-built graces. The unclarity of motion that had been
suggested in the Italian sequence was now replaced in favor of a truly
'frozen' entry in They're Coming!. Careful observers will note, however,
that not all the details are logically followed through. Somehow, the
pumps have gotten mixed. And the model on the back left has reversed the
stationary and moving leg. In film one would say that the continuity is
missing. Oversight - or intention deriving from a horror of too much
smoothness, too much perfection? Newton emulated his women. He always
valued dominant femininity. The high-heeled shoes, the strong upshot, the
light, neutral background against which the contours of the women stand
out as if chiseled all strengthen the impression of the threat, especially
in the 'undressed' ver-sion. In the magazine business, the right side is
usually considered to be the more important. In the Vogue premier, the
naked variant is to the left, the clothed to the right - a layout that
seems logical as long as one fol-lows the direction of reading and reckons
that the human being is initially naked and only afterwards clothed. When,
however, Newton was re-sponsible for the order of the sequence, as in his
Big Nudes, he reversed them - perhaps indicating which of the motifs held
more importance for him. At the same time, the charm of the two
photographs clearly resides in their character as a diptych: only in terms
of such a thesis and anti-thesis does the theme develop its full interest.
Vogue presented the sequence under the title "Beaute - Silhouette 82". The
lead-in was brief: "Work on your body so it can wear the fashions of the
coming season with grace." Interestingly, in the autumn of 1939 a similar
theme had appeared in the French Vogue: looking toward the coming lines
that were fitted to the contours of the body: the corset had been
reinvented and was now being recommended once more to women. Today, one
offers them a fitness studio and hand-weights. Helmut Newton was without a
doubt a witness of the dramatically changing role of women in society. And
he was their important, if often misunderstood, iconographer.
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Helmut Newton,
born Helmut Neustadter (October 31, 1920, Berlin, Germany –
January 23, 2004, West Hollywood, California, USA) was a German-Australian
fashion photographer noted for his nude studies of women.
Born to a German-Jewish
button-factory owner and an American mother, Newton attended the
Heinrich-von-Treitschke-Realgymnasium and the American School in Berlin.
Interested in photography from a young age, he worked for the German
photographer Yva (Else Neulander Simon). In 1938 Newton left Germany to
escape persecution and worked briefly in Singapore as a photographer for
the Straits Times before settling in Melbourne, Australia. Once he arrived
in Australia he was first interned, along with many other "enemy aliens",
before serving with the Australian Army during World War II as a truck
driver. In 1946, Newton set up a studio in Flinders Lane and worked
primarily on fashion photography in the affluent post-war years. In 1948
Newton married actress June Browne, who later became a successful
photographer under the ironic pseudonym 'Alice Springs' (after the central
Australian town). He also assumed Australian nationality. He went into
partnership with fellow photographer Henry Talbot in 1956, and his
association with the studio continued even after 1959 when he left
Australia for London. The studio was renamed 'Helmut Newton and Henry
Talbot'. Newton settled in Paris in 1961 and began extensive work as a
fashion photographer. His works appeared in magazines including, most
significantly, French Vogue. He established a particular style marked by
erotic, stylised scenes, often with sado-masochistic and fetishistic
subtexts. A heart attack in 1970 slowed his output somewhat but he
extended his work and his notoriety/fame greatly increased, notably with
his 1980 "Big Nudes" series which marked the pinnacle of his erotic-urban
style, underpinned with excellent technical skills. He also worked in
portraiture and more fantastical studies. Newton was extremely fond of his
hometown of Berlin, and in October 2003 he donated an extensive photo
collection to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. It is currently
on display at the Museum of Photography near the Berlin-Zoo railway
station. In his later life, Newton lived in Monte Carlo and Los Angeles.
He was killed when his car hit a wall in the driveway of the famous
Chateau Marmont, the hotel on Sunset Boulevard which had for several years
served as his residence in Southern California. It has been speculated
that Newton suffered a heart attack in the moments before the
collision.[citation needed] His ashes are buried next to Marlene Dietrich
at the Städtischen Friedhof III in Berlin
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