HELMUT NEWTON
Big Nude III, Paris, 1980
© The Helmut Newton Estate / Maconochie Photography / Courtesy Kicken Berlin
Biography
Helmut Newton (German, 1920–2004) served an apprenticeship in the Berlin studio of fashion and society portrait photographer Yva, who significantly influenced his later work. In 1938 Newton emigrated to Singapore and later to Australia where he worked as a fashion and commercial photographer. In 1956 he returned to Europe and began working in 1961 for such magazines as Vogue and Elle. In the 1970s he concentrated on his own portrait projects and glamorous, erotic stagings of women in self-confident poses. In 2000 the projected Centrum für Photographie mounted a comprehensive retrospective of Newton’s work at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie. Upon the initiative of Newton’s gallerist Rudolf Kicken and the former Director-General Wolf-Dieter Dube, Newton founded the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin (2003) to administer his archive.
