Closing as Non-Compliant (Hard Paywall) ~ MJM
Female friends are often surprised when I say I admire the work of Helmut Newton. “But he objectified women!” a younger colleague scolded me a couple of years ago. I knew the sort of photos she’d have in mind: pneumatic Bunny Girls, a model on all fours on a hotel bed with a Hermes saddle on her back, and a taxidermied crocodile with the buttocks and long legs of a woman protruding from its jaws.
Plenty of feminists loathed the work of the late photographer, who would have turned 100 at the weekend, and who’s celebrated in a new documentary, Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful. For instance, the film shows a clip from a French TV show in the 1970s, where Susan Sontag jousts with Newton over his work. The photographer protests, “I love women!” and Sontag replies, “A lot of misogynistic men say that. I am not impressed.”
My colleague would have agreed. Still, I told her that I see many things when I look at a Newton photograph, but certainly not a passive object. Even the saddled woman – an infamous photo from 1976 – gazes from the frame with humorous malevolence, as if taunting the viewer with knowledge of their own tawdry fantasies. Newton’s women have an uber-vamp quality that emits strength, not vulnerability.
David Adams
Article URL : https://www.telegraph.co.uk/art/artists/helmut-newtons-work-isnt-misogynistic-kind-sexy-risk-taking/