Your Weekend Plans Should Include a Viewing of Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful - Vogue.com

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Grace Jones and Dolph Lundgren, Los Angeles, 1985Photo: © Helmut Newton, Helmut Newton Estate / Courtesy Helmut Newton Foundation

Indeed, power is one of Newton’s main subjects, and it’s what makes his work so controversial, never more so than now in this moment of cancel culture. The photographer was unapologetically politically incorrect, a characteristic that is celebrated by the director. “I am fundamentally against restricting the freedom of art,” von Boehm says, nonetheless, he includes archival footage of Betty Friedan accusing Newton of being a misogynist. In contrast, model Sylvia Gobbel says she felt transformed when posing for the photographer. “When you are 20 years old, 1.80 meters tall with blond hair, you feel like a hunted deer. And Helmut Newton’s photos made me stronger. I controlled the situation, I wasn’t the deer, I was equal to the hunter, I could decide what I wanted to do.” Nadja Auermann, the subject of some of Newton’s most triggering images, including one in which she describes herself looking like a discarded doll, opines: “We can say that this is sexist or misogynistic, but we can also say that he holds up a mirror to society: and basically shows [that] you want your wife to run around in a short skirt and basically treat her like a Barbie.”

David Lynch and-Isabelle Rossellini, Los-Angeles, 1988Photo: © Helmut Newton, Helmut Newton Estate / Courtesy Helmut Newton Foundation

Maybe one of the most perverse decisions Newton, king of nudes, made was to choose fashion photography as his medium. As Gobbel so sagely observes, Newton’s pictures (and not just the dressed/undressed series she refers to) showed that women didn’t need designers’ trappings to be powerful, because they were already so in their own skin.

Rue Aubriot, Paris, 1975Photo: © Helmut Newton, Helmut Newton Estate / Courtesy Helmut Newton Foundation

Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful is available in virtual cinemas through Kino Marquee.

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Your Weekend Plans Should Include a Viewing of Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful - Vogue.com
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