Helmut Newton | MONOVISIONS - Black & White Photography Magazine

MonoVisions Black & White Photo Contest 2024

Helmut Newton (1920 – 2004) was a German-Australian photographer.

He was a “prolific, widely imitated fashion photographer whose provocative, erotically charged black-and-white photos were a mainstay of Vogue and other publications.” Newton led the ultimate glamorous life. He lived in the Chateau Marmont in the winter months, to keep the cold and gloom at bay, befriending Billy Wilder, Dennis Hopper and Robert Evans. He was married to fellow photographer Alice Springs, quirkily named after a pin was placed in a map.

Newton arrived in Paris in a white Porsche, was hired immediately by French Vogue, commissioned by Playboy, had a heart attack at 50, and lived in Monte Carlo. Then in a final fling – or what Karl Lagerfeld poetically described as “his last picture, taken by himself”, he crashed his Cadillac on Sunset Boulevard aged 83, on January 23 2004.