Artist of the day: Artist of the day, July 21: Helmut Newton, German-Australian photographer

Thursday, July 20, 2017

Artist of the day, July 21: Helmut Newton, German-Australian photographer

Helmut Newton (1920 – 2004) was a German-Australian photographer. Newton, who was born into a wealthy Jewish family in the often decadent Weimar Republic, fled Nazi Germany with his parents in 1938. The 18-year-old chose to seek his fortune in Singapore, but he was interned as an enemy alien and sent to Australia. He served in the Australian army from 1940 to 1945 and settled in Sydney after the war. He was a "prolific, widely imitated fashion photographer whose provocative, erotically charged black-and-white photos were a mainstay of Vogue and other publications

Dubbed the “King of Kink”, influential fashion photographer Helmut Newton made his name shooting models in striking, provocative black-and-white photographs for Vogue. “If a photographer says he is not a voyeur, he is an idiot,” he once said. Newton is considered to have imbued fashion photography with narrative depth, giving context to his subjects by creating stylized, dreamlike scenes. Vogue’s U.S. editor-in-chief Anna Wintour once described his work as “synonymous with Vogue at its most glamorous and mythic.” Newton was married to fellow photographer Alice Springs, and he led a glamorous life, associating with the likes of Billy Wilder,