Helmut Newton’s Early Books

Helmut Newton is one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century. He was renowned for staging his images in a highly lascivious and provocative manner, at times pushing beyond the boundaries of conventional social morality. His exceptionally innovative photographs, most of which were commissioned by the most prestigious magazines, were published regularly from the 1950s onwards. In 1975, he exhibited them in galleries for the first time, and a year later his first photo book, *White Women* or *Femmes Secrètes*, was published; it sold very well at the time and won the Kodak Photo Book Award in the same year – though it was also controversial from the outset.

This was followed in 1978 by *Sleepless Nights* (*Nuits Blanches*), and a further three years later by *Big Nudes* (*47 Nudes*). The titles refer to the different publishers and languages of the books; their content remained virtually unchanged. These publications, now as famous as they are notorious – and which established Newton’s international reputation even independently of his countless magazine features – are absolute classics of the photobook genre.

The Newton Foundation is marking the 50th anniversary of the book *Femmes Secrètes* by once again staging an exhibition featuring numerous photographs from the three books. This new presentation is also based on the exhibition conceived in 2012 for the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston; at that time, the photographs published in the books were transformed into modern exhibition prints. During his lifetime, these early, partly iconic images – straddling the boundary between fashion and nude photography – were never shown together. To complement this, display cases now feature the original mock-ups of the books with various cover designs, small-format ‘work prints’, medium-format ‘lifetime prints’ – which presumably served as lithographic templates at the time – as well as reviews from various magazines of that era.

Femmes Secrètes

With his first photobook, Newton pulled off a daring coup, as he paved the way for a visual eroticisation of fashion that culminated in 1980–1981 in his famous ‘Big Nudes’ and ‘Naked and Dressed’ series for various issues of *Vogue*. Helmut Newton had already been developing the unusual idea of presenting contemporary fashion with clothed and unclothed models in the form of diptychs by the mid-1970s, and had also hinted at it in *Femmes Secrètes* with a variation on his iconic fashion image ‘Yves Saint Laurent, Rue Aubriot’, which he photographed one night on the street of the same name in 1975 for French Vogue; a few minutes later, he took another version, this time combined with a nude model. In this book, he thus subtly combined nudity and fashion for the first time in still images with a cinematic quality.

Sleepless Nights

He arranged another selection of contemporary black-and-white and colour photographs with comparable sophistication; these were published in 1978 in his second book, “Sleepless Nights” – having previously appeared in numerous magazines. Here, too, the focus is on women, their bodies and their clothes; many of the photographs are not merely fashion images, but also portraits or semi-nudes; these include three smaller, iconic series: models with orthopaedic support prostheses, created shortly after J.G. Ballard’s legendary novel *Crash*, or with Hermès leather saddles, which were the subject of particularly heated debate, as well as the so-called ‘Dummies’. In the mid-1970s, whilst working on fashion assignments for French *Vogue*, Newton used mannequins, which he had secured with wires to the Pont Alexandre III bridge over the Seine late at night, for example. These were styled by stylists in such a way that one could only tell the difference between a live model and a life-size mannequin at second or third glance – an unusual, indeed radical, visual concept that Newton had already introduced into fashion photography in the mid-1960s.

Big Nudes

His publication *Big Nudes* finally made the photographer, now in his early 60s, world-famous: this book, too, was published for decades from 1981 onwards, printed in hundreds of thousands of copies, and also by several publishers and in multiple languages. Karl Lagerfeld contributed a foreword to the German edition. Newton explained the origins of “Big Nudes” in his autobiography as follows: he had been inspired by the large-format RAF wanted posters issued by the German police to take full-body nude photographs in the studio using a medium-format camera, which he later printed life-size. He first presented them in this unusual format in 1981 at the Galerie Daniel Templon in Paris, accompanied by the first edition of the book, which at that time was not yet titled ‘Big Nudes’ but was simply called ‘Helmut Newton’, published by Éditions du Regard in Paris. The first five ‘Big Nudes’ from 1980, numbered in Roman numerals, as well as the life-size diptych ‘Sie kommen’ from the ‘Naked and Dressed’ series, have been on display in the upper lobby of the Helmut Newton Foundation since its opening in the summer of 2004. They are among Newton’s best-known bodies of work.

• A special exhibition by the Newton Foundation at the Museum of Photography – State Museums in Berlin