In a meeting on a television set, Susan Sontag blurts out to Helmut Newton: "As a woman, I find your photos very misogynistic." "I love women, it's what I love most in the world," the photographer replied. Then, the philosopher and essayist concludes: “That is what many misogynists say, but they represent them with humiliating images. The executioner loves his victim. Decades after that interview, Newton's (1920-2004) images, which revolutionized fashion photography thanks to his unabashed eroticism and uncommon wit, continue to be problematic. "But talking about misogyny is a mistake," insists Matthias Harder, director of the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin and curator of Private Property, an exhibition that brings together the 45 images selected by the author himself for the book of the same name published in 1989.
In the rooms of FotoNostrum, the new space on Diputació street that shows Newton's iconic work in Barcelona, there is a controversial photograph from 1976 that at the time infuriated feminists. A model poses on all fours on a bed with a saddle behind her. "A lot of times he didn't design the scenes, he let the women act freely," says Harder. “When you see the shots that he did before and after you realize that the women are simply playing, and he witnessed a joke,” adds Julio Hirsch-Hardy, the director of the space. Newton also proclaimed himself a "feminist" who never tried to objectify women but quite the opposite: he wanted to celebrate them strong and defiant. Although he would sometimes chain them with a dog leash to the bars of a bed.
In the diptych that opens the exhibition, on one side it shows the models dressed in haute couture; to the other, the same girls, same pose, but naked. “Strong women are strong even without clothes, they don't need them”, suggests the curator who recalls that Newton defended that “photographs of nude women are fashion photographs but without clothes ”, and when I asked him why he undressed them, he answered with another question: “How do you like them better, with clothes or without clothes?”. She photographed for Vogue or Elle and worked for major erotic magazines like Playboy. Someone called him the creator of porno-chic and he earned the nickname King of perversion.
But surely Newton, who died at the age of 83 when his Cadillac crashed into a wall in Los Angeles after losing control as a result of a heart attack, did much more than that. In addition to his fashion and nude photographs of him, he was also a talented portraitist. Sometimes all three things in one shot. "I like to photograph the people I love, the people I admire, the famous people and especially the infamous ones," he said. In the exhibition you can see his magnificent portraits of Elsa Peretti, David Bowie, Charlotte Rampling or Nastassia Kinski, the latter nursing a puppet with the face of Marlene Dietrich... Also that of a woman, with her legs spread, coldly evaluating a man of whom we only see the torso... It was the time of the sexual revolution, and daring women abounded. He surely captured that too.
Tickets for the exhibition, until July 3, can be purchased through the Vanguard Tickets website. Subscribers can enjoy a 20% discount from Thursday to Sunday and holidays, and a 2x1 discount on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
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