Helmut Newton, considered fashion-photography master

By Mimi Avins
Los Angeles Times

	Helmut Newton
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LOS ANGELES — Helmut Newton, 83, the renowned photographer who in his 40-year career brought sexual provocation and menace to fashion tableaux that came to be recognized as art, died Friday in Los Angeles.

Mr. Newton was with his wife of 55 years, June, when he lost control of his car about noon when leaving the Chateau Marmont hotel.

Los Angeles Police Department spokesman Don Cox said that the car went out of control and crashed into a retaining wall across the street from the hotel. Mr. Newton died shortly after being taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

The Newtons had spent winters in Los Angeles for the last quarter-century, living at the hotel. They lived the rest of the year in Monte Carlo.

Considered, along with Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, as one of the masters of 20th-century fashion photography, Mr. Newton was a ringmaster of stylish fantasies, an outsized personality who was known for creating dramatic, erotic layouts.

His best-remembered photographs in Vogue and other fashion magazines featured long-legged models wearing high heels and dark lipstick lounging in Riviera swimming pools, beaches or parks. The backdrops were dark streets, elegant mansions and grand hotels where women were chased by spies and attended to by gigolos.

"His photographs had more of a signature than any photographer I can think of," Vogue editor Anna Wintour said Friday by phone from New York.

"They would soar off the page. The Helmut Newton woman has become part of the vocabulary of fashion photography. Like a great designer, he didn't waiver from his point of view. Fashion would change, but Helmut's vision didn't."

Born into the Jewish bourgeoisie Oct. 31, 1920, in Berlin, Mr. Newton began his photographic career in Australia and later settled in Paris and Monaco.

In the 2003 book "Helmut Newton Autobiography," he explained how images from the Berlin demimonde he knew as a child informed his later work. The towering women were reincarnations of "great big" East Prussian housemaids who worked in his wealthy household. He remembered his parents taking cures in the summer at spa hotels where "a gigolo and a gigolette sat at separate tables away from the customers."

Mr. Newton, who bought his first camera in 1932, fled Germany in 1938 when life became increasingly dangerous for Jews. He left on a boat for China, which had no Jewish quotas, but disembarked in Singapore.

After Germany invaded France, German Jews were declared enemy aliens in Singapore. His German passport had expired, and he was sent to an internment camp near Melbourne. After he was released, he served in the Australian army and began working as a photographer, contributing to Australian Vogue. He returned to Europe in 1961, where he worked for the French, English and American editions of Vogue.

Mr. Newton met his wife, actress June Browne, in Australia in 1946 when she came to be photographed. She later became a photographer as well — her nom de plume was Alice Springs — and shared his professional and social life. Their friends described their marriage — the couple had no children — as a great love affair.

The Newton style influenced such film directors as Stanley Kubrick, Brian de Palma and Roman Polanski, as well as such photographers as David Bailey, Mario Testino and the late Herb Ritts.

Robert Sobieszek, head of the photography department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art noted: "His work was never dirty. It was good clean fun, but he stretched the boundaries of what a fashion magazine looked like. He brought a sense of whimsy, a sense of fun, a sense of passion that was totally his. Many artists owe a debt to Helmut."

Mr. Newton's photographs sold for $80,000 to more than $200,000 at auction, according to G. Ray Hawkins, whose Los Angeles gallery handled his work. His photographs are in the permanent collections of museums throughout the world, and numerous gallery shows have been devoted to his work.

Mr. Newton published seven books of standard size and, in 1999, "Sumo," a hand-bound, signed coffee table of a book that came with its own stand and cost $3,000.

Wintour said Mr. Newton's last portfolio for Vogue would be published in the magazine's March issue. She said it features a model in a gold Gucci bathing suit, lying on a bed of nails.

Los Angeles Times staff writer Suzanne Muchnic contributed to this report.

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