Helmut Newton Biography

 

Helmut Newton Quotes

 

• I have mixed feelings about those sorts of things. When I see it done by interesting young people, I think it's very valid. But when established photographers, people in their forties, copy me and get a lot of money, well, I find that to be very stupid.

• I hate good taste. It's the worst thing that can happen to a creative person.

• People gave us everything for free. We were allowed only so much film per picture, but there was no limit to the creativity. I like to say that they let us loose like wild dogs in the streets of Paris.

• I like photographing the people I love, the people I admire, the famous, and especially the infamous. My last infamous subject was the extreme right wing French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen.

• I used to hate doing color. I hated transparency film. The way I did color was by not wanting to know what kind of film was in my camera.

• I was very interested in sadomasochism. It's perfectly legitimate. This was shot in a beautiful Paris hotel for a men's magazine called Adam that Vogue published at the time.

• In the photographs themselves there's a definite contrast between the figures and the location - I like that kind of California backyard look; clapboard houses, staircases outdoors.

• My job as a portrait photographer is to seduce, amuse and entertain.

• Technically, I have not changed very much. Ask my assistants. They'll tell you, I am the easiest photographer to work with. I don't have heavy equipment. I work out of one bag.

• The whole series is black-and-white, so when I went to shoot one of the women I only had black-and-white film with me. She had reddish hair and was a very pretty girl, a nice girl.

• Well, a copy was auctioned last year at a charity auction in Berlin, and it became the most expensive single book of the 20th Century.

• I did find a wonderful girl last year, but the photographs that we did were more about motorcars.

• I like girls who are just starting. They have not been formed, they have no routine, they have not been in front of the camera.

• I was lucky to have my wife as the art director, and it turned out to be quite something - a great success. I'm very proud of it.

• I spend a lot of time preparing. I think a lot about what I want to do. I have prep books, little notebooks in which I write everything down before a sitting. Otherwise I would forget my ideas.

• Highly rewarding work, especially after I had abandoned photographing young Hollywood movie stars, invariably accompanied by their agents, who would act as censors during the actual sitting. To this question, "What people do you like to photograph?" my answer is "Those I love, those I admire, and those I hate."

• In a particular photo one girl has a whip clenched between her teeth. She looked great. But I think Mr. Hermes had a fit when he saw the photos.

• It's that I don't like white paper backgrounds. A woman does not live in front of white paper. She lives on the street, in a motor car, in a hotel room.

• That magazine was delicious, divine. My happiest time as a fashion photographer was during the years I spent at French Vogue.

• The photographs don't arouse me. All I can think about is the hard work it took to make them.

• They often ask me to shoot for them. But I say no. I think an old guy like me ought not take pages away from young photographers who need the exposure.

• Well, it takes a certain amount of money. And I've got to see pictures of the person ahead of time. If I don't like the way the person looks I won't do it.

• Some people's photography is an art. Not mine. Art is a dirty word in photography. All this fine art crap is killing it already.

• The nudes and bondage shots were my way of going beyond my own bounds. Now that I've done that, I want to return to fashion with a fresh and mature eye and do more portraits.

• I just had a bellyful and realized I had shot enough nudes to last a lifetime. In fact, although I have no idea of the number, I think I photographed too many naked women.

• I now have a strong reaction against the exposed female body. Nudes will no longer be a subject for me.. though I might regret saying that the next time I see a beautiful girl on the beach.

• The point of my photography has always been to challenge myself, to go a little further than my Germanic discipline and Teutonic nature would traditionally permit me to.

• It was not until 1980 that I photographed what I consider to be my first nude. In quick succession I executed the Big Nudes, the Naked and Dressed, and, in Los Angeles, the Domestic Nudes series. The fact that the models in these photographs were the same girls I used in my fashion work gave them a certain elegance and coolness that I was looking for in my work.