Seductive, subversive photos by Helmut Newton – celebrated 20th-century photographer – to go on show in large-scale exhibition
- Some of the most famous photos taken by the legendary photographer will appear in ‘Helmut Newton - Fact & Fiction’, opening in Spain on November 18
- They include ‘Rue Aubriot’ a landmark in the canon of fashion photography that also articulated the transgressive sensuality of designer Yves Saint Laurent
His seductive and subversive images made German-Australian photographer Helmut Newton one of the most celebrated image-makers of the 20th century.
Now, a large-scale exhibition, “Helmut Newton - Fact & Fiction”, opening on November 18 at the Marta Ortega Pérez Foundation in A Coruña, Spain, will show some of his most famous images, alongside others that provide a well-rounded sense of the photographer’s range, including Polaroids he took on set during photoshoots, and atmospheric shots of places he visited.
“Helmut was by nature a re-constructor of things he had seen,” says Philippe Garner, vice-president of the Helmut Newton Foundation, who co-curated the exhibition alongside Matthias Harder, the foundation’s director, and Tim Jefferies, director of Hamiltons Gallery in London.
“There’s a real documentary dimension to his work. He’s recording the way a certain kind of woman might live, but he makes his pictures by building them artificially. They are a fiction that in a sense represents a fact.”
Born into a prosperous Jewish family in Berlin, Germany, in 1920, Newton was fascinated by photography from a young age.
“He would later say that his interest in those years was swimming, girls and photography – he put the girls and the photography together, and took up fashion photography,” Garner laughs.