Photographer: Helmut Newton

Helmut Newton (born Helmut Neustädter; 31 October 1920 – 23 January 2004) was a German-Australian photographer. He was a “prolific, widely imitated fashion photographer whose provocative, erotically charged black-and-white photos were a mainstay of Vogue and other publications.”

Each photo by Helmut Newton is immediately recognizable by his signature setup, decor and atmosphere. Each series (for Vogue, Oui, Playboy, Marie-Claire or Nova) from this artist, who is German by birth , Australian by necessity and French by adoption, is a celebration of the imagination and the soul. Helmut Newton is currently the undisputed master of fashion and beauty photography.

You always take pictures of the same type of girl, the “society girl” stylish, ambiguous and perverse...

HN: To me, bourgeois women are more erotic than a hairdresser or a secretary. Nothing in these words is meant to be negative, it’s an observation. Class, elegance, education and sociological environments are factors I believe in. I sometimes feel guilty about it, but that’s the way it is. A bourgeois woman is naturally sexy. I hate when everything is exhibited in the window - it feels cheap. On the contrary, I love when you have to dig inside. I love communicating the idea that the women I show are accessible. They are actually. Their accessibility only depends on the time and money you want to spend...

You place your fantasies in your images.

HN: Exactly. I did a series of photos for Oui. A series of photos that showed a woman walking naked under a fur coat in places as diverse as the subway, an art gallery, the Ile Saint-Louis , a car on the Champs-Elysees and a street in Paris. I know where these images come from: from a childhood fantasy. When I was 14-years-old, I read a novel by Arthur Schitzler called “Fraulein Else.” This is the story of a banker who just went bankrupt and has a beautiful 17-year-old daughter. A man offered to bail out her father if she agreed to walk down the hallway of a hotel naked under a fur coat. She hesitates but decides to do it. One night, she came down from her room and walked around the man opening her coat. The man didn’t touch her and saved her father. I love this novel, which was written in 1910 and is incredibly audacious for that period. This is where these images come from. With that said, the process of making this series was really dangerous. It’s forbidden to shoot in the subway without permission and I think for these types of photos, the RATP wouldn’t even have bothered replying. I also wanted to photograph on a riverboat. When I expressed this idea to the press manager of the company, he almost fainted, so I did everything secretly. We started the series in a sumptuous car, driven by a chauffer and parked at the corner between Rue de Berri and the Champs-Elysees on a Thursday at 1pm. The girl was naked and her only clothing was a veil. The onlookers were flabbergasted.

You love shocking people and there is a touch of vulgarity in your images.

HN: A touch? You are modest. My photos are marked with vulgarity. Creativity comes from bad taste and vulgarity. In 1957, when I worked in Europe for the first time for UK Vogue, the editor-in-chief gave me an extremely long list of things to avoid. There were no photos possible anymore. For another magazine, which I still collaborate with today, there are two editors who have the same state-of-mind. With incredible ingenuity, they keep looking for accessories such as scarves, chic handbags, ballet flats and flowing garments that hide the body and make me drunk with anger. They systematically choose all the things that a normal man would consider anti-sexual. Would I make love with a girl dressed in such a way? This is the first question I ask myself when I shoot fashion photos. These two editors don’t understand that. Their mothers were like that and they are perpetuating the tradition. Good taste is anti-fashion, anti-photo, anti-girl, anti-eroticism! Vulgarity is life, amusement, desire, extreme reactions!

Though you are extremely distant from the model in your voyeurism.

HN: Yes, voyeurism in photography is a necessary and professional sickness. Look at, capture, observe, frame, target. These are the laws of our field. The world is totally different when I look at it through the viewfinder. I always take a step back from what I see through my camera. I use it as a screen.

You often use swimming pools and hotel rooms as décor...

HN: Because I’m lazy. When I travel, I hate looking for outdoor places. I never go further than 2 or 3 km from the hotel. Plus, I love the hotels. This again,is a childhood fantasy. I love all the hotels, from the sumptuous old palaces, such as The Ritz, to the depressing, prison-like, cold, modern buildings. This is convenient, a hotel. There is room service and it’s less expensive than renting a studio. I even did two shoots in a brothel. The owner was reluctant, as he was not looking for publicity, but finally, he agreed. He loaned me a room on a slow day – Sunday, naturally. The second time, he saw me coming with the model, my assistant, the hairdresser and her assistant and he exclaimed, “Are you coming for an orgy or to take photos?!”

How do your images come to life?

HN: They come from a student notebook. In it, I write down everything I’m interested in and it is divided into three sections: ideas, girls and locations. If I don’t write, I forget. All my notes are first in a standby mode, then they start on their way, ferment and finally take shape. Last year I saw on a beach in St. Tropez, two boys and a girl who were happy being together. A perfect harmonious trio. I reproduced this situation recently for a fashion series I did for Italian Vogue. 

What was your childhood like?

HN: I was born more than forty years ago, in Berlin to a respectable, bourgeois family. I had a childhood without any problems and I adored my parents. When I turned 12, my father gave me my first camera. I did my first seven pictures in the subway. Naturally, we couldn’t see anything. The eighth image is from the radio tower in Berlin. My grades were deplorable. I was the biggest dunce of them all. When I turned 14, because at that time, school finished at 1pm, I got a job in the afternoon as a photographer’s assistant but didn’t tell my parents. This lasted for 6 months. My grades continued to get dramatically worse and my father took away my camera and locked me inside the house. At 16, my parents had lost all hope. I began as an apprentice for a portrait photographer named Yva, who was famous at the time. I’ve always wanted to be a photographer. When I was 13, I imagined I was in a raincoat, running around the world on the arm of a dreamlike creature and driving huge cars. At 14, I took photos of my friends in the streets wearing my mother’s dresses and hats. It’s during this time I promised myself that I would become a fashion photographer for Vogue. With Yva, I learned how to use a large-format camera, especially the 13x18. Yva had a really wonderful one with color slides. It was an enormous, heavy mahogany box that required a one-second exposure in the full sun at noon. At 18 years old, I left Germany to go to Australia.

Technically, you are a jack-of-all-trades. There is no camera you haven’t tried.

HN: Yes, I’m searching, I’m trying, I’m experimenting, but this is a common practice. The range of amateur cameras is wider than professional. Why wouldn’t I be interested by it? The miniaturization of the bodies and the flashes can be really helpful. All my material today is composed of four bodies, five lenses, one flash, one Polaroid and everything fits in luggage that weighs 17 kilos, which allows me to take any type of photo, anywhere, in any condition.

How did you evolve technically?

HN: I started with a large-format Graflex, 4x5 inches, Super D, then I turned to Rolleiflex. I don’t like the Hasselblad, as it’s too heavy and too noisy. Afterwards, I consecutively used Nikon (in 1962, following the advice of Frank Horvat), Konica, Olympus and Instamatic. Today, my definitive choice is Nikon and Pentax. I recently got a Leica CL in my hands. This is a wonderful object, but I can’t use it. I don’t feel my images through this viewfinder. It took me a while to get used to the 24x36. From the Rolleiflex that you wear at your belly to the Nikon that you wear at eye-level, this is a very different vision and perspective.

Are you a fanatic of Kodachrome II?

HN: Yes, but this emulsion lacks sensitivity and it’s still too slow. I sometimes use Ektachrome X in certain conditions.

What are your favorite lenses?

HN: The longest possible one that still enables me to not lose the contact with the subject I’m shooting. When I shoot in a hotel or a studio, I always have my ass touching the wall. I don’t like the studio. I hate backgrounds and only feel at ease outside. I’m not a good technician. I was really bad. I’ve made some progress. The automatic system helped me a lot in that field. I built myself a technique based on simple means and, if possible, not requiring the help of an assistant. A large part of my work lies on the use of flash.

Which photographers have inspired you?

HN: Penn, Avedon, Baron de Meyer, Steichen, Honeighen Hune, William Klein, Weegee, Sander, Brassai and Lartigue.

We could say a few young photographers are shooting “some Newton.” What do you think about this?

HN: This amuses me enormously but I’m quite happy about it. In the beginning, one should always be inspired by someone you admire. I did the same thing when I was young. We always mimic someone at one point or another in our life, but then, we need to follow our own path.

What do you hate about photography?

HN: Dishonesty. The disgusting image shot in the name of an artistic principle. Blurry images. Grainy images. Bad technique.

To young boys who would love to become a photographer, what advice would you give them?

HN: Ideally, to be the assistant of the photographer of your choice, but not even 1 in 10,000 would get that opportunity. I think that a young photographer should be hired in a big, commercial studio in order to get familiarized and to learn the ABC’s of the technique. In the meantime, he should take photos whenever he has a free moment. When one wants to be a photographer, you should live exclusively towards achieving this goal.

Would you like to teach?

HN: Yes, this would captivate me. Jeanloup Sieff, Peter Knapp and I have imagined a project that we may achieve one day. This would consist of limited courses that would imitate real photo shoots. Maybe one day?

website: www.helmutnewton.com

facebook: www.facebook.com/newtonfoundation

You can see the full documentary right here: http://youtu.be/comaEaE2Qaw

Photographer: Peter Lindbergh

Peter Lindbergh, born Peter Brodbeck, is a German photographer and filmmaker, born on November 23, 1944 in Leszno, Poland (the city was German between 1939 and 1945 and called Reichsgau Wartheland). He currently maintains residences in Paris, Manhattan, and Arles.

In a certain kind of factory, everyone is famous for 15 minutes. But in the case of Peter Lindbergh, the images created in his factory are eternal. In fact, it is the industrial landscape the steelworks in his hometown of Duisburg, Germany that has shaped his romantic, humanistic eye for more than 30 years.

Cut to 1992. Linda Evangelista, one of the superest of supermodels, is flying back to the United States via the Concorde to be photographed by Lindbergh for Bazaar, soon after he was lured to the magazine by Liz Tilberis. "They put me in a limousine and I dozed off. I pull up, look around, and burst into tears. I went first-class all the way to this ugly, abandoned, filthy factory in Philadelphia! For Harper's Bazaar!" She sighs dramatically. "The pictures were gorgeous. But after, I told him, 'No more factories; you take me to châteaus.'"

His pictures, often rendered in black and white with their industrial guts (cameras, lights, cords) showing, exhibit a deconstructed kind of beauty. "I show elements of the set in my pictures because it's not real," Lindbergh explains. "When I see movies, I often love the 'making of' more than the movie itself. It's not so final. When you have a woman just standing there, it doesn't mean much."

Lindbergh's success is due to one thing: His pictures mean a lot. He originally studied art in Berlin, beginning his photography career almost by accident. "Someone I knew needed an assistant. But I could have easily been a baker or worked in a flower shop." In 1973, he started shooting monochromatic advertising campaigns. ("Black and white, you see under the skin, no?") Today Lindbergh's imagery is instantly recognizable: from British Vogue to Harper's Bazaar; in campaigns for Dior, Giorgio Armani, Prada, Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, and Lancôme; numerous exhibitions; and five books. And sometimes, when arriving in New York from his home in Paris, he drives past his epic portraits of Kate Moss or Daria Werbowy on billboards for jeweler David Yurman.

After all, Lindbergh loves women. Most famously, his eye is responsible for defining the era of the supermodel. The inception: the January 1990 cover of British Vogue (commissioned by Tilberis, then the editor in chief, and styled by Brana Wolf, both of whom later came to Bazaar), where he assembled Evangelista, Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, and Tatjana Patitz in downtown New York. "It was a new generation, and that new generation came with a new interpretation of women," he explains. "It was the first picture of them together as a group."

That cover, of course, also inspired George Michael's "Freedom 90" video, directed by David Fincher. "Yah!" says Lindbergh. "I heard George Michael say that it was the most beautiful picture of women he'd ever seen. Funny, I have never met George Michael." Crawford says, "It was definitely a moment. That photograph plus the video plus Gianni Versace the stars were all in alignment." Turlington, famously the most earnest of the bunch, observes, "Those pictures that Peter captured are definitely some of the most incriminating of the supermodel era."

Does Lindbergh miss the era of the supermodels, those sublime creatures who, thanks to his pictures, seemed to live so many of our dreams? In a way. While he likes today's stars ("Daria and Jessica Stam, they're great, no?"), he laments, "There is so much time you waste looking for new faces. You don't want a new woman every five days. I started with my girls when they were 19 or 20, and they became friends too. They became 25, 28, 30, really incredible, mature, intelligent, and extraordinarily beautiful. After all, each had to run a one-woman million-dollar business. You don't become a supermodel by being stupid."


But then along came grunge and--with the exception of Moss--the era of the faceless model. "When people said it was all over, I had to go back to 17-year-old teenagers," he recalls. "It was terrible! You live with a great wife for 20 years, she leaves you, so you run off with the next girl with nice boobs and a miniskirt?


"For a while, Linda was married to my best friend," Lindbergh says of Evangelista, his factory girl, whom he met in the late '80s. "At first, there was something about her I didn't feel. But shortly after that, we worked together almost every day. At one point, I had the feeling we had done everything we could do together, so I said, 'Why don't you cut your hair short?' She was shocked. But one day, she showed up on set and said, 'I want to cut it.' Julien d'Ys took that beautiful Italian hair and snipped it right off. She cried for two hours. The white-shirt picture of her was taken the next day, and a new woman was born. She was a good model, but she became the model."

Evangelista adds, "Peter said, 'You're going to love this picture in 25 years.' It's almost 25 years, and I do." Her other favorite? Lindbergh's "flying" for Bazaar in 1992, in which she was suspended above the Manhattan streets. "But that hurt! I was hanging from a crane. I was so excited about it — until they lifted me up."

Cut to 2009. Naomi Campbell is in Moscow, stuck in traffic and cooing down the phone line, "Oh, Peter! I first worked with him when I was 16; we are like brother and sister." The session, shot in Deauville, was inspired by Josephine Baker, and Lindbergh wanted "a black girl who could dance." "I had to be naked in the rain on the boardwalk," Campbell remembers. (After all, Lindbergh notes pragmatically, "The jewelry that day was beautiful.") So was Naomi on time for her brother? "Ha! I was always lying to everyone," Lindbergh says. "She was always late, but I loved her so much, I lied. I'd say, 'She is right on the minute. What are you talking about?'"

Turlington was more punctual. "Peter's photographs are very cinematic, his portraits so raw," she says. "My first impression of Peter was that he was more gentle and sweet than the images he captured." Lindbergh adds, "Christy was so laid-back. She had a quietness and was very positive, never negative. She was stunningly beautiful, almost too perfect." Apart from the time she was photographed giving him the finger on the set of a Prada campaign. Turlington laughs and says, "I love that picture."

Lindbergh was not so in love with Helena Christensen's book the first time he met her. "It was filled with heavy hair and makeup — not so fabulous. But in the back, there was a picture of her taken by her neighbor in her apartment. That was it." Off to the desert they went, where Lindbergh shot Christensen for a now-famous alien story that catapulted her onto the super list. "That's the shoot I remember most," says Christensen, "the weirdest of them all. Also, we did a cover with a white horse, and the horse got quite excited, so to speak. There was some retouching to be done on the horse afterward!"

"At the time we started together, Peter's style was shockingly different," says Cindy Crawford. "At a time when it was all big hair and pushing the boobs up, he stripped you of those props and showed you in a different way. It's like being photographed right when you wake up in the morning." Ironically, familiarity is to blame for why Lindbergh initially didn't embrace his countrywoman Claudia Schiffer. "I felt I knew that kind of person too well; she wasn't exotic. It's a pity, because I wasted time with her in the beginning. We grew into each other. She is a true woman now." Says Schiffer, "It's like a friend is taking your picture. A long-lost friend."

In this litany of ladies, there are, of course, the girls. Lindbergh says, "Kate Moss and Amber Valletta, they came in later. Karl Lagerfeld said in my book 10 Women, 'Perhaps only Amber and Kate possess the key to the mysterious door of the near visual future.' Ha! Kate is such a light person. She's a very funny, naughty girl, and she's always ready to do something totally unexpected."

Moss remembers a particularly unexpected shoot in Rome for Bazaar in 1994: "I had to walk the streets in the highest stilettos you have ever seen, for three days! We caused quite a stir. But it was worth it." Valletta posed in one of the photographer's most famous shoots, the angel story for Bazaar in 1993. "I think we may have been the first people to close down a part of Times Square for a shoot. It was unheard of at the time," she remembers.

The woman Lindbergh would most characterize as a muse, however, is Milla Jovovich: "When Milla comes in, you feel like something is going to happen." Jovovich, who appears on the cover of Lindbergh's book Untitled 116, her face bare save for a dark slash of lipstick, recalls once taking off her makeup after a shoot. "Peter said, 'Stop!' and took the picture. It's strong yet vulnerable and iconic, but without trying to prove anything." Jovovich speaks of Lindbergh like family. "My favorite word of his is beautiful, beautiful!"

Women, of course, can be an insecure lot. On shooting actresses, Lindbergh observes, "They are so fragile because of the number of people involved. Often their publicists speak for them. Kate Winslet [whom Lindbergh shoots for Lancôme], though, speaks for herself. I'm madly in love with Kate, Julianne Moore, and Reese Witherspoon as well." What about shooting First Lady Michelle Obama? "The problem is that you get 10 minutes. If I could do a real portrait of her, I would walk to Washington."

Real. As ironic and misplaced as the word appears in a world of artifice and aspiration, it's the word that continues to define Peter Lindbergh. Evangelista says, "Of all the people I've worked with, he's the one who has photographed the real me, whoever that is." Campbell concurs: "It's something intimate that Peter gets out of you, something you may not want to show to everyone. But he gets it." Turlington says, "I never felt like I was not my true self in front of his camera, which was rare in the '90s."


Valletta observes, "Peter and I have driven all over the world. He doesn't do the driving, though. He's too busy talking and playing music to drive." What else? "Oh, he wears a Speedo. Well, he may not anymore, but I have seen him in a Speedo. He's got great legs!" On set, "sometimes we have wine at lunch," Crawford sighs, "hang out, have a little sandwich."


Though to a large degree he has defined glamour, Lindbergh was never lost in it. Happily married to photographer Petra Sedlaczek, "I have four kids, a life," he says. "I go out very rarely in Paris. If it's a fashion party at a nightclub, I wouldn't dream to go. People come to you for your work, not because you go to all their parties.

"I don't feel like a fashion person," he continues. "I don't even have a little earring somewhere."

What Lindbergh does have is an epic collection of blue cotton shirts, a uniform on set and in life. "He has one shirt, in multiples," says Evangelista. "I think he has one and he washes it every day," laughs Jovovich. "No, he usually buys a dozen at a time because he's worried they'll stop making them!" says Campbell. "He loves his Gap shirts. It used to be Wrangler."

"Gap? Wrangler?" Lindbergh repeats, shocked. "I get them specially made by JLR in Paris! Oh, well, I guess they don't look like it...." Then he breaks into a big German laugh.

website: www.peterlindbergh.com

facebook: www.facebook.com/peterlindberghofficial

Behind the scenes with world renowned photographer Peter Lindbergh on commercial assignment for Club Monaco.

Some scenes taken from the Peter Lindbergh film "Supermodels" Tatjana Patitz, Cindy Crawford, Stephanie Seymour, Linda Evangelista and Naomi Campbell.