In August 1975, on a narrow street in the Marais district of Paris, the German-born photographer Helmut Newton, fifty-four years old, set up a Hasselblad on a tripod and waited for the light to fall. The street was rue Aubriot, in the 4th arrondissement, between rue des Blancs-Manteaux and rue Vieille-du-Temple. The model was Vibeke Knudsen, a regular collaborator. The garment was Yves Saint Laurent’s women’s tuxedo, Le Smoking, which Saint Laurent had introduced nine years earlier and which had not yet become the icon of 1970s women’s tailoring it was about to become. The shoot crew consisted of Newton, the editor-in-chief of Vogue Paris Francine Crescent, a hair stylist, Knudsen, and one other model. The total was five people.
Newton had been living on rue Aubriot since 1961. The street outside his apartment door was the location he had requested for the shoot. The light was the light of the street lamp outside his bedroom window. He used no flash. He used the lamp.
Knudsen stood three-quarters to the camera, her hair slicked back, a white tie at her throat, a cigarette in her right hand, her left hand in the trouser pocket of the tuxedo. She looked back at Newton through the lens. The photograph, published in the September 1975 issue of Vogue Paris and reprinted in Newton’s first book White Women the following year, became the single most reproduced fashion photograph of the decade. It is still, fifty years later, the image most people see in their minds when they hear the phrase 1970s fashion photography.
The Rue Aubriot Photograph
The rue Aubriot photograph was not a documentary image. It was a constructed image arranged to look like a documentary image. Newton had been studying the technique of the Hungarian-French photographer Brassaï, whose 1930s book Paris de Nuit had captured the city of bars, brothels, and side streets using nothing but available street lighting. Newton wanted the same texture for fashion photography. He wanted the viewer to feel they had stumbled on the scene by accident, the way the reader of a Brassaï book stumbled on the night Paris of the 1930s. Brassaï had photographed the Paris that already existed. Newton was photographing a Paris he was constructing as the shutter closed.
The technical choices were specific and unusual for fashion work. No flash; a single street lamp provided the key light. Long exposure on the Hasselblad. Black and white film. A model trained to hold still without expression. The decision to photograph Yves Saint Laurent’s women’s tuxedo, the most ambitious of the garment’s appearances in the trade press to that point, in a deserted side street at night rather than in a marble-floored Paris studio, was a refusal of every convention of postwar fashion photography. Richard Avedon, Newton’s senior contemporary, had built American fashion photography on white seamless backgrounds, soft fill light, and smiling models in motion. The rue Aubriot photograph had no white background, no fill light, no motion, and no smile.
The image was published in the September 1975 Vogue Paris. By the time White Women collected it in 1976 it had been reprinted across the European fashion press. By 1980 it had become the visual reference for the entire decade of women’s tailoring. The model had no agency in the staging. The photographer had all of it. The result was an image of a woman who looked like she had agency, had power, knew what she was doing in the city at night. The sleight of hand was Newton’s. So was the influence.
Berlin, 1920 to 1938
Helmut Neustädter was born in Berlin on October 31, 1920, the second son of Klara Marquis and Max Neustädter, a Jewish button-factory owner from Berlin-Schöneberg. The family was prosperous. The factory employed several hundred people. The household had a cook, a maid, and a chauffeur. The young Helmut, in his own later account, was a poor student, an excellent swimmer, an obsessive photographer, and a precocious romantic. At sixteen he was apprenticed to the celebrated Weimar fashion and portrait photographer Else Ernestine Neuländer-Simon, who worked under the professional name Yva, in her studio in Berlin-Charlottenburg.
Yva had been one of the major figures of late Weimar photography, working for the German illustrated magazines that historians have called the most sophisticated photographic culture in interwar Europe. She had developed a style that used shadow and theatrical light to render fashion images as cinematic compositions, distinct from the cleaner studio photography that dominated London and New York. Newton later wrote that he learned almost everything he knew about photography from Yva, and that he had been quietly in love with her. Yva was Jewish. Her photography license was revoked by the Nazi regime in 1936. Her studio operated illegally through 1938. She and her husband Alfred Simon were arrested in 1942 and deported to the Sobibor extermination camp in occupied Poland, where they were murdered. Newton would write about Yva in his memoirs as the formative influence on his career.
On the night of November 9, 1938, during the coordinated nationwide pogrom known as Kristallnacht, the SS arrested Newton’s father Max and held him in a concentration camp for approximately a month. Within weeks of his release the Neustädter family had decided to leave Germany. Klara Neustädter purchased a steamer ticket for her eighteen-year-old son to Shanghai. On December 5, 1938, with two cameras in his hand luggage and almost no money, Helmut Neustädter boarded a train at Berlin’s Zoo Station bound for Trieste, where the Italian liner Conte Rosso would carry him out of Europe.
Singapore to Paris
Newton never reached Shanghai. He disembarked the Conte Rosso at Singapore, where a refugee welfare committee was looking for technical skills and his photographic training found him a brief job at the Singapore Straits Times. He was fired within months. He was, by his own account, too slow for daily news; the moment had passed by the time he had his lighting set. He worked briefly as a society photographer for the Raffles Hotel set before the British colonial authorities, who classified him as a German enemy alien at the outbreak of the Second World War, deported him to Australia in October 1940.
He was interned at Camp 3, Tatura, in rural Victoria, where he lived in barracks for the next sixteen months. Released in early 1942 to work in the fruit orchards of Shepparton, then conscripted into the Australian Army’s 8th Employment Company, he spent the remainder of the war in unglamorous labor. In 1946, by deed poll, he formally changed his name from Helmut Neustädter to Helmut Newton, the surname he had begun using since arriving in Australia. He took Australian citizenship the same year. He married the Australian actress June Browne in 1948. He opened a small photo studio with Henry Talbot, a fellow former Tatura internee originally from Germany, in Melbourne.
His commercial career through the 1950s was steady but unremarkable. He shot for Australian Vogue, then in 1957 was invited to London for what was supposed to be a year-long contract at British Vogue. He quit after eleven months, disliking England and the rain. He worked briefly in Paris for Jardin des modes, returned to Australia, then in 1961 was offered a full-time contract by Vogue Paris. He took an apartment on rue Aubriot in the Marais and moved his wife to France. He was forty years old. He spent the next ten years producing competent, conventional fashion photography for the magazine in a style indistinguishable from the work of his peers. None of it predicted what came next.
The Heart Attack
In April 1971, on a Vogue assignment in New York City, Newton suffered a major heart attack on the street near Central Park South. He was fifty years old. He was taken to Lenox Hill Hospital, where he spent several weeks in convalescence. He told friends afterward that the experience had clarified what he wanted from his remaining career. He had spent ten years at Vogue Paris making what he called pretty pictures of pretty clothes. He decided he would now make the pictures he actually wanted to make, even if Vogue Paris did not want to publish them, even if no one else did either.
His wife June, herself by now a photographer working under the name Alice Springs, told him to push the work as far as he could. Newton later credited her with the permission to do everything that followed. From 1971 forward, Newton’s editorial work for Vogue Paris, Vogue Italia, and the German illustrated magazines acquired a darker and more deliberately constructed tone. He photographed women in hotel suites, on yachts, on the rooftops of Riviera villas. He photographed them in stiletto orthopedic boots and chauffeur uniforms, on horseback, leaning on Mercedes saloons. He photographed them with riding crops, with cigarettes, with brandy snifters, with each other. He often photographed them naked. The clothes, when they were present, were Saint Laurent and Chanel and Karl Lagerfeld’s Chloé. The setting was almost always a marker of European wealth: the Cap d’Antibes, the Berkeley Hotel, the Negresco.
The editor of Vogue Paris, Francine Crescent, who had taken over the magazine in 1966, defended Newton’s work to her publisher when the work upset readers, which it regularly did. Newton’s images were the most controversial regular feature of the magazine through the 1970s. The complaints came from feminist readers, from advertisers, from American licensees who refused to run the European Vogue spreads in their domestic editions. Crescent kept publishing him. By 1975 Newton was producing the most discussed fashion photography in the world.
White Women
White Women was published in 1976. It collected the previous five years of Vogue Paris and Vogue Italia work, including the rue Aubriot photograph, and it was the first photograph book of Newton’s career. The reception was bifurcated and remained so for the rest of his life. The fashion press treated White Women as a major artistic statement. Feminist critics treated it as the systematic and luxurious objectification of women by a wealthy German émigré who had built a career photographing the daughters of the European bourgeoisie in compromising positions. Susan Sontag would debate Newton on French television about exactly this in 1979. Both readings of his work were defensible. Newton refused to choose between them.
Sleepless Nights followed in 1978, Big Nudes in 1980. The Big Nudes were a deliberate break: standing female figures over life size, photographed in his Monte Carlo studio against blank white backgrounds, the models confronting the camera with no clothing and no apparent subject matter besides the assertion of their own physical presence. The series was Newton’s pivot away from the narrative fashion photograph and toward what would become 1980s advertising photography: figures isolated from context, scaled up for billboard reproduction, designed to read at a hundred meters from a moving car. Calvin Klein, Versace, and the major luxury houses would borrow the formula within five years. By the late 1980s the language of luxury advertising worldwide was working in some idiom borrowed from the Big Nudes.
Newton moved with June from Paris to Monte Carlo in 1981 and spent winters at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, a hotel he had been using since 1957. He continued to work for Vogue and Vanity Fair and Playboy through the 1990s. He photographed portraits of Margaret Thatcher, David Lynch, Charlotte Rampling, Madonna, and the Princess of Wales. On January 23, 2004, leaving the Chateau Marmont in his rented Cadillac, Newton suffered a fatal heart attack at the wheel and crashed into a wall on Marmont Lane. He was eighty-three.
Avedon photographed clothes. Penn photographed clothes. Newton photographed the woman wearing the clothes. The white background became the hotel suite. The smiling model became the woman looking back at you. Every fashion photograph since works inside Newton’s grammar or against it.