The dark room of a photographer’s life

It may turn out that fashion photography was a 20th century phenomenon, born, along with fashion magazines, at the intersection of commerce and art. It has produced three masters, none of them young: Irving Penn, born in 1917, Richard Avedon, born in 1923, and Helmut Newton, born in 1920. Penn and Avedon, with their use of white backgrounds and strong light, are the Apollonians, Newton the prince of darkness. Born in Germany and transformed during World War II into an Australian, this gregarious, cranky, charming man with a drawling accent and the candor of a Berliner returned to Europe in 1961 and began shooting for the French, then English, then American Vogue.

Over the last four decades, his compelling photographs have made sexual provocation and menace a part of fashion and allowed us to see the potential for danger, mystery and juice in our time. There was even a thriller built around his work, “The Eyes of Laura Mars.”

Newton uses certain elements in his photos so consistently that they amount to fetishes: tall women, short men, dark shadows, white skin, dark lipstick, long legs, exposed breasts, and very high heels. He likes hotel rooms, beaches and parks, has an affection for leather, cross-dressing and women in various kinds of trusses and braces. He has been much copied by other photographers whose heavy pastiches have infected the pages of magazines, but no one can approximate him. His photographs describe a polished demimonde so sexually specific as to appear a dogged re-creation of fantasies and memories, as if he were trying to rebuild a lost world.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve known Newton for years and worked with him occasionally, as a writer and as an editor.)

With the publication of his autobiography at age 82, Newton’s lost world is revealed, and so is his character: a Candide whose journey from spoiled rich kid to refugee to gigolo to political prisoner to ringmaster of stylish fantasies, narrated in a flat conversational tone, reveals boundless optimism and an endless appetite for what we’ll call boom boom.

He was born into the Jewish bourgeoisie of Berlin. His mother, known as Klara or Claire, was a wealthy widow with one son, Hans, when she married Max Neustadter, a poor soldier from Silesia who took over running her late husband’s factory, which made buckles and buttons.

Claire had an ample bosom, beautiful legs and frequent attacks of “nerves.” She dressed their son Helmut as a girl, in velvet suits with high collars, taffeta bows and short pants, and kept his hair long, in a Louise Brooks bob. He was a cosseted child, 10 years younger than his half brother, Hans. He had weak ankles, a tendency to faint and a short attention span. “I was insufferable, but I was cute,” he writes. A chauffeur conveyed him to school, where the other children beat him up. “Not because I was Jewish, but because I couldn’t defend myself.” His was a secular, wealthy household where Christmas was celebrated and the synagogue ignored.

“Many of my fashion photographs have been taken in places that remind me of my childhood,” he writes. By the beginning of the first chapter, the essential elements of Newton’s photos are there. The dark rooms: an apartment “as big as a house” on the Innsbruckerstrasse, with a green tiled stove in the foyer, parquet floors, Oriental carpets and heavy dark furniture with turned legs that “looked like giant corkscrews.” The towering women: “great big” East Prussian housemaids. A focused attention on said women: 3-year-old Helmut in bed, watching his half-naked nurse, the Kinderfraulein, putting on makeup, and becoming excited by his mother’s bare arms when she comes in to kiss him wearing only pearls, a bra and a slip, which, he notes, is always flesh colored. The louche surroundings: his parents taking “cures” in the summer at spa hotels where “a gigolo and a gigolette sat at separate tables away from the customers.”

Menace: “I would stand on the balcony ... to watch the Zeppelin come in from America, and I would look down the street and watch the pitched battles between the cops and communists and Nazis.”

And sex: Hans showed him his first prostitute on the street, “Red Erna,” so named for her red hair and red riding boots. She carried a whip. He masturbated so much that his mother took him to the family doctor, who advised him to “do boom-boom with girls,” and once he had done so, he told his mother. She increased his pocket money so he could buy condoms, because “I don’t want you bringing any stuffed pigeons home.”

In 1932, he bought his first camera from the German equivalent of a five-and-dime and took a diagonal shot of the Berlin Radio Tower in the manner of the artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Two years later, the Nuremberg racial laws began to eat away at the lives of German Jews. Helmut, then 14, was taken out of his Gymnasium, where Jews were being forced to sit at the back of the class, and put in the American school. His father thought Hitler “couldn’t last.” By the following year, an Aryan had been put in charge of his factory. He had to sell his car, because Jews could no longer own them. Claire, with foresight, took the money and hid it in the linen press.

Helmut was indifferent to what was happening; a champion swimmer, he kept going to the Halensee for his daily workout, despite the sign that said: “No Jews or dogs allowed.” There were the same signs outside the Berlin cafes, and in the parks, special yellow benches for Jews. He fell in love with a fashion model he met on the bus, an Aryan girl, and when his father found out, he beat him. The racial laws forbade sexual contact between Jews and Aryans: “The whole family,” he writes, “could have ended up in a concentration camp.” He dropped out of school at 16 and became apprenticed to a woman photographer, also Jewish, named Yva.

He saw the beginning of Kristallnacht from the window of a bus, on his way to a photography lecture. By the time he got home, his father had been taken to a concentration camp. He was released thanks to a “good German,” a Gestapo officer who told Helmut to leave the country at once. The money hidden in the linen press got him a passport -- with a huge purple ‘J’ for Jewish on every page -- and secured passages out of the country. He went to China, which had no quotas for Jews, his parents to South America, where Hans had been since 1936. Yva’s studio was taken over by an Aryan, and she was later sent to Auschwitz, where she died.

The boat to China was called the Conte Rosso, and as Newton describes it, it was a great big party. “Everyone was having a wonderful time, drinking and carrying on.... There was the strange atmosphere of dancing on a volcano; we all knew that once we got off the boat it was curtains.” He was 18 but sought out the older women on board, married women in their 30s. “They had all the sex appeal, the glamour and the excitement I was looking for.”

It was said that people with certain skills would be allowed to land at Singapore. A woman on the British colony’s refugee welfare committee noticed him. She was Josette Fabien. He was allowed to come ashore and given a job as a photographer at the Straits Times, which sacked him after two weeks. He lived in a boardinghouse full of rats and bugs, and escaped to read Somerset Maugham at the public library. Josette invited him to lunch. Boom boom. She set him up as a portrait photographer, and on his 19th birthday she gave him a watch inscribed “to Bebe from Josette.” “With the gift of that watch, my transition was complete. I was a true gigolo,” he writes. Josette grew increasingly possessive. He went back to the library, where he began looking at magazines, in which the Hollywood portraits by George Hurrell and the dark Paris photos of Brassai made him aware of how far he had strayed from his ambition to become a Vogue photographer. He suddenly and acutely realized he was no more than a kept boy.

After Germany invaded France, German Jews in Singapore were declared enemy aliens. His German passport had run out. The police summoned him to be interned, and this put him in “seventh heaven .... I now had a perfect excuse to get away from Josette. I was going to move on to some other place -- no one knew where .... All my friends were going to come with me, the guys I knew from Berlin or Germany.” The boat was the luxurious Queen Mary, and it turned out to be bound for Australia. The internment camp, near Melbourne, was called Tatura One, and he was thrilled to be with his mates, all Jews or communists. Tatura Two held the Aryan Germans, of the “Nazi conviction.” He remained interned for two years. A Jewish committee sent packages that included tuxedos; the Salvation Army sent toothpaste.

He got out when he was chosen to pick peaches for a local farmer, then joined the Australian army, loafing his way through as a private. Discharged in 1946, he changed his name to Newton and opened a photography studio. A young actress, June Browne, came to be photographed. They fell in love, and once he disentangled himself from an engagement to a Jewish woman, they married. He began to work for Australian Vogue and was invited to London in 1957. For the next four years, riding the conflicts between her acting work and his ambition as a photographer, they traveled between Australia, London and Paris. In 1961, a wary Alex Liberman, editorial director of American Vogue, wrote telling him to stay at Australian Vogue. Instead Helmut and June rented out their house and moved to Paris.

Newton developed his style at French Vogue, where he could do what he wanted. Memos flew around among the different Vogues, warning editors of the erotic content of his pictures. But in the photos there also were spies, girls chased by planes, dark streets, mysterious mansions, as well as scenes that looked like orgies. His work reflects a film director’s will: expressionist and libidinous. Many of the outrageous concepts came from June: “I would shake the ideas out of her until she came up with something I could get my teeth into.” Throughout the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s, the Newton mystique grew.

June Newton became a photographer herself, standing in for Helmut when he had a heart attack in 1973. Her witty pseudonym, not mentioned in the book, is “Alice Springs,” after the Australian town. In 1983, partly because of taxes, they moved to Monte Carlo. His fourth exile did no harm to his work; it coincided with his discovery of the small Italian seaside town of Bordighera, where he now prefers to shoot his photographs in a park that looks somewhat German. “I am ending my story here,” he writes at the end of the book’s first part, “because people who have arrived at their goal, who are not hungry any more, are no longer interesting. Getting there is what this book is all about.”

The second part is about Newton’s photos. The stories about navigating the imperatives of fashion magazines while keeping his vision (complaining loudly at the intersection of commerce and art) are as fascinating as the rest, though some of them have appeared before, in his 1984 photo book “World Without Men.” They moved me less, however, because, as Newton says, “Fashion pictures rarely have any logic, each one is a moment without a beginning or an end.” War, exile and adventure illuminate his work as no amount of art director anecdotes can.

Since his groundbreaking “White Women,” released 27 years ago, he has published seven extraordinary photo books of normal size and “Sumo,” a hand-bound, signed behemoth that comes with its own stand and costs $3,000. His autobiography finally tells us who he is and proves that the child is key to the man. His father said to him in 1934: “My boy, you’ll end up in the gutter. All you think of is girls and photos.” He was right. The gutter, in magazine terms, is the center of the double page spread, where the pages join the binding. *