TOP GUN!

My job as a portrait photographer is to seduce, amuse and entertain.

– Helmut Newton

Helmut Newton–was born in Berlin (1920) to a German-Jewish family. The oppressive restrictions placed on Jews resulted in his father losing his button-factory. Soon after, his father was placed in a concentration camp. November 1938 his family decided to leave Germany and they fled to Chile. When Helmut turned 18 he was issued a passport and he fled Germany in December 1938. He boarded the ‘Conte Rosso’ (with others who were escaping the Nazis) which led him to Singapore. He got a job as a portrait photographer with the Straits Times.

In 1956 he won a contract with British Vogue, so he left for London. A year later he left for Paris, where he landed jobs with high-fashion magazines like Vogue, Elle, and Marie-Claire.

By the 1970s, Newton became internationally known in the fashion-photography world. This fashion photographer’s style was imitated widely. His photography is known to be provocative, mostly black and whites and some critics bashed his work because they thought it was close to pornography.

Unfortunately, Newton passed away in 2004 due to a fatal car accident when he crashed in the driveway of the famous Chateau Marmont Hotel in Los Angeles–which was also his residence for several years.

Newton turned high fashion into a form of erotica.

In exposing the way sexuality is transformed into power Newton transgressed the beyond the boundaries of fashion photography