“Any photographer who says he's not a voyeur is either stupid or a liar,” Helmut Newton once said. Provocative and erotically charged, his work not only carried sadomasochistic and fetishistic subtexts but introduced them into mainstream photography. Unlike his contemporaries, he was drawn to what is typically deemed “bad taste”. “I love vulgarity,” he said in an interview in 1978, “I am very attracted by bad taste – it is a lot more exciting than that supposed good taste, which is nothing more than a standardised way of looking at things.”
Friends with Karl Lagerfeld, Newton was a mainstay in many fashion magazines, including various editions of Vogue and Elle. And it’s these images – his editorial work – that is the subject of a new exhibition at the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin. Titled Helmut Newton: Pages from the Glossies | Greg Gorman: Colour Works, the show will include images spanning over four decades, from the mid-50s to the late-90s, with work for Vogue and Elle as well as British society publication Queen (now out of print) and German news magazine Stern.
However, as its title suggests, the exhibition will also play host to 25 large scale portraits by Greg Gorman – the American portrait photographer of Hollywood celebrities – his first colour photography show in Germany. The subjects of these portraits include some of pop culture’s most iconic figures: Grace Jones, David Bowie, Andy Warhol, Sophia Loren, Al Pacino, Iggy Pop.
Check out the gallery above for a preview of this exhibition.
Helmut Newton: Pages from the Glossies will run December 3, 2015–May 22, 2016 at The Helmut Newton Foundation, Jebensstraße 2, 10623 Berlin, Germany.
