Following his death in January 2004, Helmut Newton’s position as one of the world’s most celebrated and distinguished fashion photographers is assured. For many, however, he was much more than that. His controversial and innovative portraiture broke down taboos, documenting and shaping society’s changing attitudes to sex and female empowerment. Indeed author JG Ballard has argued that Newton was in fact nothing less than ‘the world’s greatest visual artist’.
The ‘Cyberwomen’ series was commissioned exclusively by Eyestorm in 2000. The models in the series are all posed in everyday locations around Los Angeles. ‘There’s a definite contrast’, Helmut Newton…
Following his death in January 2004, Helmut Newton’s position as one of the world’s most celebrated and distinguished fashion photographers is assured. For many, however, he was much more than that. His controversial and innovative portraiture broke down taboos, documenting and shaping society’s changing attitudes to sex and female empowerment. Indeed author JG Ballard has argued that Newton was in fact nothing less than ‘the world’s greatest visual artist’.
The ‘Cyberwomen’ series was commissioned exclusively by Eyestorm in 2000. The models in the series are all posed in everyday locations around Los Angeles. ‘There’s a definite contrast’, Helmut Newton says, ‘between the figures and the location - I like that kind of California backyard look; clapboard houses, staircases outdoors. I get inspired, in America, by a certain kind of sleaziness.’
Born in Germany in 1920 to German and American parents, Helmut Newton was interested in photography from a young age, working in Singapore and Australia. During World War II, Newton put his career on hold to be a truck driver for the Australian army, then later married June Browne (or Brunell as she was later known), an Australian actress who later became a photographer under the pseudonym ‘Alice Springs’.
Newton regained his career as a photographer in the 50’s and went into partnership with Henry Talbot in 1956. In 1961 Newton settled in Paris where he concentrated on Fashion Photography with sado-masochistic and fetishistic subtexts and nude studies of women. This marked the beginning of the work that he would become famous for.
In later life Newton lived in Monte Carlo and Los Angeles, where he finally met his death when he suffered a heart attack whilst driving and his car hit a wall. He was 84 years old.
Newton’s SUMO is the biggest, most lavish book production of the 20th Century. A bold retrospective of Newton’s lifetime work and career, it has broken records for weight, size and resale price. SUMO was originally published in 2000 in an edition of 10,000 signed and numbered copies and sold out soon after publication. It now features in numerous important collections around the world, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and number one from the edition, which is signed by over 100 of the book’s featured celebrities, breaks the record for the most expensive book ever published in the 20th Century, selling in auction in 2000 for $430,000.
The new, unsigned and unnumbered edition shown here is much smaller in scale and is the fulfilment of an ambition conceived by Newton some years ago to allow his landmark piece to reach a much wider audience.
