Helmut Newton: Early Years

Fans of the boundary-pushing German photographer Helmut Newton had only a few sketchy facts about him before the publication of his 2002 autobiography, which came out two years before his death. It revealed his origins and the start of his career: Newton was born to a wealthy family in Berlin in 1920, escaped the Holocaust via a boat to China in 1938, ended up in Melbourne, Australia, where he started his career by setting up a small portrait studio and met and married June Browne (aka Alice Springs).

How Newton got from Melbourne to London and then Paris, and then on to New York and Los Angeles, was not entirely clear before, and one always felt that Newton, with his quirky sense of humor, sort of liked it that way. Thankfully, the book details his earliest interactions with Vogue, in particular his interactions with its dramatic editor in chief at the time, Diana Vreeland, and its editorial director, Alexander Liberman.

The same could be said of Newton’s mood, and after numerous attempts at doing the kind of story Vogue expected, he finally decided to call it quits. When Vreeland wrote Newton in 1967, asking him to come to New York to photograph the spring collections, he replied, “Thank you, but I’d rather not.” He chose instead to entrench himself in Paris, where he created work as sophisticated and edgy as the city itself, exposing some of the darkness hidden in the City of Light. He captured fearless and liberated females who, somewhat in the tradition that celebrated fin de siècle demimondaines, seemed to live for pleasure.

Newton and Mellen pursued the topic again in the January 1975 issue, with a single picture for a beauty article titled “Exercise Out.” This time it was models Lisa Taylor and Jerry Hall (the future Mrs. Mick Jagger) posed on a beach, with Taylor appearing to pull out Hall’s hair while each model grasps the other at hip level. Since its appearance, the image has proved endlessly fascinating and always ripe for further analysis. It’s not surprising that from around that time until the end of his life, Newton was affectionately referred to as the “King of Kink.”