Rampling affirms of the Newton shoot: ‘I recognise myself entirely. Photo suggests that the shoot ‘seems to resituate her in the ambivalent world of her recent cinematic success, in Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter’, another film whose subject was the trauma of Nazi power and abuse. The present image, from a shoot undertaken for Photo magazine, is the most celebrated of a number of powerful portraits he made of her, portraits that, at the time and ever since, have significantly reinforced her image as one of the most stylish, complex, and mysteriously alluring of stars. Visconti had recognised untapped potential in Rampling, an enigmatic, still, intense quality – he called it 'The Look' – that also struck a chord with Newton. Newton’s pictures combine premeditation and artifice with an opportunistic reportage sensibility, and are all the more persuasive for situating his sophisticated figures in authentic contexts.Ĭharlotte Rampling, whose film roles had so far been relatively lightweight, was cast by Luchino Visconti for his sombre, shocking 1969 film The Damned, the story of a powerful German family facing the nightmare rise of the Nazis in the 1930s, a story highly pertinent to Newton, the son of prosperous Berlin Jewish parents and forced, traumatically, to flee his homeland in 1938 at the age of eighteen. ![]() ![]() His imagination, however seemingly outlandish, was always rooted in realities. His images were always inspired by things he had seen – places, situations, gestures. Newton would henceforth constantly push the limits of provocation for his editorial and other commercial work, bringing multiple layers of narrative and implication to his picture-making. He became the Helmut Newton we know today, hailed as one of the most original and influential imagemakers of his era. ![]() After his heart attack he raised his game, drawing on the unique resource of his own experience, his perversity and incisive observation finely tempered with dark humour. Newton’s subject matter had always extended beyond fashion per se to reflect a profound curiosity about the way a certain class of women lived. This proved a pivotal event, crystallising a determination to invest more of his own history in his work and of his voyeuristic fascinations with the erotic. Helmut Newton was already a well-established fashion photographer with a certain reputation for provocation when he suffered a heart attack on the street in New York in the autumn of 1971.
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