Helmut Newton's stark, beautiful, often sexually ambiguous images first appeared in French Vogue in 1961 to an avalanche of critical shock and outrage. Provocative and disturbing, his work for the magazine revolutionised fashion photography and launched him on to the world stage as a purveyor of "porno chic" and stylish irreverence. By the 1980s, he had established himself as one of the most important and influential photographers of the 20th century.
Newton transformed his models into odalisques and icons, acting out dark and often erotic fantasy tableaux set in a world of hedonistic luxury. Lounging in anonymous hotel rooms, or stalking the streets in stilettos, naked beneath their furs and jewels, they represented a race of glacial, alpha females, and it is their potency that has driven Newton's creative and emotional energy for more than 60 years. Through his books and exhibitions, he continues to push the boundaries of possibility. Thirty years on, the images - though still unsettling - are no longer shocking. He has made voyeurs of us all.
Newton's long-awaited autobiography goes some way to explaining the man behind this singular universe. He was born Helmut Neustadter to a wealthy Jewish family in Berlin in 1920. It was a privileged, overprotected childhood, not helped by his mother's insistence on dressing Helmie (as she called him) in velvet suits with taffeta bows. By his own admission, he was a spoilt brat ("I was insufferable, but I was cute. If I wanted something, I got it") yet his unwavering self-regard and life-loving exuberance served him well in the difficult years that followed.
He bought his first camera at the age of 12. At 15, his three passions were photography, girls and swimming, and by the time he left school at 16 he was apprenticed to a society photographer known as Yva, from whom he learnt everything but who died at Auschwitz. Weimar Berlin became Newton's playground, and the decadence and sexual freedom of that time are an indelible part of his work.
After Kristallnacht in 1938, Newton's parents fled to South America, while their 18-year-old son was despatched safely (they hoped) on a steamer to China. Helmie had the time of his life with the bored female passengers and left the boat with one of them in Singapore to become a photographer with the Straits Times as well as a gigolo. In 1940 he was shipped to Australia and spent two years in an internment camp, then joined the Australian army.
He loved Australia, and after his military discharge he changed his name and set himself up in a small studio in Melbourne, where he met and married his actress wife, June, in 1948. They are still married, and June - who as "Alice Springs" is no mean photographer herself - seems to have been the one anchor in his turbulent, driven life.
Newton's candid, irrepressible prose style, with its relish for sexual and social detail, is well suited to documenting his misspent youth and even better for the dramas of the international Vogue years that followed. But frustratingly, the shutter closes abruptly in Monte Carlo in 1982 at the height of his career because, he says, "to write about one's successes, small or big, is simply of no interest to the reader".
Ah, but how we would have loved to go backstage. Instead, the second half of the book comprises Newton's notes about his work and the people and places that have influenced him. His attraction to the great, the good and the nasty as portrait subjects reveals much about his fascination for power, class and status. He loves powerful people. Even Margaret Thatcher turned him on. She hated her unsmiling portrait, which now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London. Helmie loved it. "She looked like a shark," he says.
For his 80th birthday in 2000, the German Centre for Photography invited him to mount a major retrospective in Berlin, at Mies van der Rohe's Neue National-galerie. One wonders what he and June (who curated the show) thought about the perverse symmetry of the city that had so ignominiously rejected him in 1938 hosting his birthday celebrations. Paradoxically, Berlin will also be the final resting place for his archives. Newton describes it as a "fait accompli" and at the end of the book recollects the day in 2002 that he first visited the beautiful archive building behind the city's Zoobahnhof, the railway station. From one of the windows, he looked straight across to the station platform where he had said goodbye to his parents 64 years earlier. He never saw his father again. "I am not a sentimental guy," he writes, "but I could not suppress a certain frisson as that day came back to me."
