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Helmut newton photographs10/30/2023 “Why did I pick ten women? Because there were almost no statements from women about Helmut,” Von Boehm says matter-of-factly. ![]() Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful’s all-female cast list is very much by design. When Grace Jones describes Newton as “a little bit perverse”, she immediately qualifies this observation by saying: “But so am I, so it’s OK.” Vogue’s Anna Wintour says she used his photographs as “a stopper” in her magazines because she knew they’d be powerful enough to stop readers from idly flicking through the pages. Charlotte Rampling, Claudia Schiffer, Isabella Rossellini, Marianne Faithfull and others pay tribute to his greatness as a photographer and playfulness as a collaborator. “I must say I miss him very much every day,” Von Boehm says touchingly when I interview him over Zoom shortly before the documentary’s UK release.Ī mix of affection and reverence for the photographer is also a recurring theme in Von Boehm’s fascinating new talking-head interviews with some of the prominent women he shot. The director’s affection for his subject is palpable and seems to provoke candour from Newton in fly-on-the-wall footage shot several years before his death on January 23, 2004. Still, this bias doesn’t stop Von Boehm’s film feeling insightful – far from it. There’s little doubt the “bad” in this film’s title means “a little bit naughty” as opposed to anything actively malignant. ![]() The only substantive criticism of the somewhat fetishistic way Newton depicted women in photographs for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and other publications comes from an archive clip in which feminist icon Susan Sontag tells Newton she dislikes his work. Directed by journalist and filmmaker Gero von Boehm, a friend of the late provocateur and his widow June, Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful doesn’t offer an impartial analysis of the man who was often described as photography’s “enfant terrible” and sometimes “the king of kink”. Helmut Newton would have turned 100 this month, so a new documentary celebrating his life and work arrives with impeccably poignant timing.
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