January 24, 2004
Helmut Newton: dead
Helmut Newton is dead. He was killed in a car crash in Hollywood today. The wire services report that he left the Chateau Marmont, lost control of his Cadillac limousine and ploughed into a wall nearby. The newspapers are publishing their obituaries.
Helmut Newton, Me and Courbet 1996.
Newton mocked the fashion industry he was a part of. He understood that we are seduced by the fashion image rather than the product the image promotes. This transgression meant that he was more than a fashion photographer.
True, he was an old voyeur of women's bodies:
Veruschka, Nice, 1975
Hence the 1970's 'feminist criticism of Newton. This held that the female is an object of masculine desire whilst the female spectator can only lay claim to the gaze of the camera by becoming masculinized. Much of the feminist critical discourse over the next two decades ceded the erotic pleasures of looking to the male subject alone, constructing as masculine the very position of desiring access to the sexual image. From memory, this critical discourse used psychoanalysis as an account of the acquisition of sexual difference, and interpreted Freud to assert that female subjects are without access to the erotic pleasure of looking at sexual images. At best, women can have such access to the pleasures of looking at sexual images only through mimicking the spectator position of the male.
Newton undermined the objectifying masculine gaze than opens up a space for female sexuality in patriarchal culture:
We move from a woman being an object of masculine desire to a self-determining subject with her own fantasies and desires to affirming her own sexuality in confrontation with the male gaze of the camera.
Sex and power redefined. I cannot find the fashion images online where the woman gazes at a man's naked body as an object of desire.
But it is not difficult to imagine a lesbian artist appropriating Newton's photographic images to talk about the erotics of pleasure in looking and female visual desire.
Newton did more than reflect the changing sexual power relationships that took place in the 1970s. He had a Bataillian eye that explored the nexus where pleasure, pain, joy and anger converge:
This intersects with a further feminist criticism of Newton that he depicts women bound and gagged or wearing leg irons.
What I'm calling Newton's Bataillian eye focuses on the taboo's of society and getting around them. Hence in the 1980s he adorned his models in neck, back and leg braces. The soft-hard contrast of smooth human flesh against the hard, sharp edges of the brace confuses the gazing spectator. What Newton plays with is our (men and women) response being a sexual one and we find corsetry both restrictive and sexual:
Newton highlights the similarity of bondage gear to orthopaedic appliances, even though orthopaedic bracing has a medical purpose whereas bondage is about restrictiveness leading to sexual pleasure.
Helmut Newton, From Sleepless Nights, 1978
This recodes orthopaedic appliances as bondage gear.
There is a post on Helmut Newton as a fashion photographer over at Junk for Code