![]() ![]() ‘In doing so, he earned himself a reputation as one of the most important photographers of the 20th century.’Īmong Newton’s roster of iconic images for French Vogue is the 1975 campaign for Yves Saint Laurent’s tuxedo nicknamed ‘Le Smoking’, which depicts an androgynous woman with slicked-back hair in a dimly lit Parisian alley. With his controversial scenarios, hyper-sexualised imagery and models who combined beauty, eroticism and strength, ‘Newton subverted the traditional conventions of fashion photography’, explains Christie’s specialist Jude Quinn. It was during his 25-year collaboration with Paris Vogue that Newton firmly established his international reputation and defined his signature style: highly stylised and erotically charged black-and-white photographs that embraced elements of glamour, fashion, erotica, portraiture and documentary, while flirting with provocative themes such as voyeurism. Newton ‘subverted the traditional conventions of fashion photography’ From Australia, the couple moved to London for a short period, before in 1961 settling in the fashionable Marais district of Paris. In Australia, Newton served five years with the Australian army and met his wife June Brunell, also a photographer, who later took up the name Alice Springs. There he worked briefly for The Straits Times, before leaving for Melbourne in 1940. ![]() In 1938, with Jews facing increasing hostility in Germany, Newton’s parents moved to South America, while Helmut set sail for China, disembarking en route in Singapore. He arrived at Paris Vogue via Singapore, Australia and London The 49 black and white shots of Big Nudes marked the beginning a new size for the photography of humans: those gigantic photos that, from this moment on, were to enter galleries and museums throughout the world.2. With this volume published in 1981, Newton arrived at his position of a leader in the history of images in the second half of the twentieth century. This was a more retrospective book which contained 71 photos (33 in color and 38 in black and white) made for various magazines (Vogue included) and it was the one that defined his style and made it into an icon of fashion photography. In this case, however, Newton began to explore a vision that transformed the images from fashion photos into portraits, and from portraits into reportage, almost as though they were crime scenes. Once again it is women, with their bodies and clothes, that are at the centre of Sleepless Nights, published in 1978. Balanced between art and fashion, the shots are mainly of female nudes through which he presented contemporary fashion. When selecting the photos, Newton interspersed a sequence, one next to another, of shots that had been commissioned with those he had made for himself, thus constructing a narrative which was a search for style, for the discovery of elegant gestures underpinned by the existence of a further reality, of something that it is up to the viewer to interpret.įor White Women, published in 1976, Newton chose 84 images (44 in color and 40 in black and white) and, for the first time, introduced nudity and eroticism into fashion photography. The exhibition collects together images from “White Women”, “Sleepless Nights”, and “Big Nudes”, the first three books by Newton published at the end of the 1970s, books that are today considered legendary and which were the only ones to be edited by Newton himself. The show, curated by Matthias Harder and Denis Curti, and organized by Civita Tre Venezie in collaboration with the Helmut Newton Foundation, is the outcome of a project inspired in 2011 by June Newton, the widow of the great photographer. White Women / Sleepless Nights / Big Nudes presents, for the first time in Venice, over 200 images by Helmut Newton, one of the most important and famous photographers of the twentieth century. From 7 April to 7 August 2016, the exhibition Helmut Newton. With this exhibition, a project by the Fondazione di Venezia in partnership with Civita Tre Venezie, Casa dei Tre Oci confirms its position in the field of art and, above all, of photographic culture with its rooms exclusively devoted to photography.
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