Helmut Newton valuation
Fashion photography as power, staged in hotel corridors and swimming pools, at large scale.
Helmut Newton was born Helmut Neustadter in Berlin in 1920, apprenticed to the photographer Yva, and fled Germany in 1938, reaching Australia by way of Singapore.
What a work by Helmut Newton is worth
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Bio
Helmut Newton was born Helmut Neustadter in Berlin in 1920, apprenticed to the photographer Yva, and fled Germany in 1938, reaching Australia by way of Singapore. From the 1960s he worked for French Vogue and built a manner that is unmistakable: hard flash or hard sun, wealthy and slightly sinister settings, saddles, prosthetics, mirrors, and women photographed as figures of power rather than display. Big Nudes and Sumo — the latter a book so large it came with its own stand — are the emblematic projects. He died in a car crash in Los Angeles in 2004, and the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin holds the archive.
The images exist across a wide range of formats and dates, from period gelatin silver prints to the very large later prints, and the size and print date are what identify a specific work rather than the image itself. Editions are usually small and are documented by the Foundation, which is the authenticating reference and continues to authorise printing. Signature is generally in ink on the recto or verso with an edition number and a copyright stamp. Poster and book material circulates widely and is regularly offered as though it were photographic.
SUMO, and the Foundation in Berlin
SUMO, published by Taschen in 1999 and edited by June Newton, runs to more than four hundred pictures and was issued in a signed and numbered edition of 10,000, plus 200 artist's proofs, each with a metal stand designed by Philippe Starck. Copies are collected as books, and the stand and the signed and numbered page both count towards completeness. Taschen has since issued smaller editions of the book, which are a different thing.
In 2003 Newton gave around a thousand of his photographs to Berlin, and since 2004 the Helmut Newton Foundation has shown his work in the Museum für Fotografie there. The Foundation's records are the reference for editions and for printing after his death.
The Conte Rosso, Flinders Lane and the Polaroids
Newton's father owned a button factory in Berlin. Helmut bought his first camera at twelve and worked for Yva from 1936. He left Germany on 5 December 1938 and sailed from Trieste on the Conte Rosso. Interned by the British in Singapore, he was shipped to Australia on the Queen Mary, reaching Sydney in September 1940, and after his release he picked fruit in northern Victoria and then drove trucks for the Australian Army. He became a British subject in 1945 and took the name Newton in 1946, the year he opened a studio in Flinders Lane in Melbourne.
In 1948 he married the actress June Browne, who later photographed as Alice Springs. A commission for an Australian supplement to Vogue, published in January 1956, led to a year's contract with British Vogue, and in 1961 the couple settled in Paris, where he worked for French Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. From the 1970s he used Polaroids as a sketchbook to test light and composition, including for the Naked and Dressed series begun in 1981, and in 1992 he published Pola Woman, made up only of them. His books include White Women in 1976, Sleepless Nights in 1978 and Big Nudes in 1981.
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