Helmut Newton and Stiletto Feminism

Independent on Sunday, May 2001

"Helmut Newton?" hissed a senior fashion editor in the mid-Nineties, when "the Helmut Newton look" was sweeping catwalks yet again, in retro nostalgia for power-suits photographed by Newton in French Vogue in the early Seventies. "He's disgusting! Vile! A real old sicko!"

Helmut Newton is the creator and undislodgable emperor of porno chic. SM is a fashion statement today because of him. Next week the Barbican is celebrating his 80th birthday with 200 pictures from the three most important areas - fashion, nudes, and portraits - from his last forty years of work. Work that classic feminism has always blasted for degrading and demeaning women.

What do we think? Is it or is it not sexist, exploitative and misogynist, for a man to photograph Tina Chow roped to the bar of her husband's restaurant, naked women prowling the Paris Metro in stilettos, open fox-fur capes and pubic hair, or hung round in hotel bedrooms with whips, chains and jewelled handcuffs, the more decadent, the more Cabaret, the better? To shoot nudes in orthopaedic corsets, making love to shop-front dummies, crouching on hands and knees under saddles on a bed, pushing each others' heads down the lavatory? To connect them so glaringly with the whole battery of male fantasy, underarm hair, thongs, boots, set in viciously public male power-architecture contexts: Paris pissoirs, chateaux gardens, marble balustrades, opulent hotel steps? And all in that centre-piece of male fetishism, stiletto heels?

It is not just Newton's own work people denigrate: it is his influence. This began in Paris in 1961: he started in Vogue, in fashion, which is all about how women are looked at. In the Seventies his fashion-work became more taboo-breakingly intense with implications of bestiality (for example) in American Vogue in 1975. By 1980 he had started on nudes, and progressed to nudes in chains, callipers, wheelchairs, post=operative scars. So powerful was his eye, so intelligently stylish, witty and sometimes cruel his technique, that he too the whole world with him. The heart of the feminist case against Mr Newton is that he chic'd pornography up, irrevocably, from dirty macs to Calvin Klein.

The counter case, made in his exhibitions and books, curated and edited by his wife June (a.k. a. the photographer Alice Springs), is that he gives women power. The chains, whips and handcuffs are jokes ( "Any idiot could get out of those", he said of "Roped Torso"). These women are no victims. The Barbican curator Tomoko Sato, who collaborated on the exhibition with June, its Guest Curator, says they "define the role of women as commanding partner rather than passive object". Newton loves power in women. (He did a portrait of Lady Thatcher, clothed.) His vision of women is dominatrix: a liberating ikon of what America's George magazine calls "stiletto feminism", in which chains, cleavages and thongs postmodernly become a way of empowering women.

Does stiletto feminism, playing to male fantasy, really empower women? Dressing up in thongs and chains means accepting men's fantasy as a parameter of your life along with other necessities like hair conditioner. If you dressed to attract a tiger, you'd drape yourself in fresh-killed buffalo, but would wearing what a tiger desires make you more powerful than the tiger? Does a man stating your case as dominatrix empower you, or is it just another male way of looping women round with the visual stimuli men get off on, while letting women think it gives them power? Even while she guns men down, a manmade Lara Croft, tomb-raider, is still a male sex-toy.

I don't think Helmut Newton's photographs should pay attention to either argument. They are mining a different vein completely. Some may be about exploitation and misogyny, but they are not misogynist themselves. Nor do they give women power - how could they? What they do is express is a vision. Their point is how manmade that vision is.

When I spoke to him this week, Helmut Newton said, "I use what God gives me, but I arrange the world the way I like it ." This is a man obsessed by how he sees, using the electrically intelligent technique he has evolved, plus the genius God gave him, to explore, not women's power or degradation, but how he himself looks at women. A man (even the photographer, or his own shadow) looking at the all-important naked woman is an important feature in his work. "Every great photographer is a voyeur," he says. "If he denies it, he is a liar or a fool." His subject is not women but male fantasy about them.

He hates the word artist ("this fine-art crap is killing photography; in my vocabulary, art is a dirty word") but Carol Squiers, curator at New York's International Centrer of Photography, says "He works out of his gut, he's accessing something important to him the way an artist would." And strong art makes familiar things disturbing, and strange, which in Helmut's case means presenting newly and upsettingly how men (starting with himself) see women. In his photo pairs "Clothed and Unclothed", the first picture shows a dressed model, the second puts her in the same pose, same setting, but surreally naked. The camera has undressed her. The movement of sun, the changing shadows, underline the sense of sequence. From "Brescia 2.00" to "Brescia 3.30", the second picture offers a man the consequence of his own gaze.

One aspect of Newton's strangeness is the creepy solemnity of the faces. The pictures are stylishly witty, when he talks he laughs a lot, he gets huge fun out of his own life, but the people in his sexy pictures never laugh. Why ?

"When sex came into my life," he told me, "it was deadly serious. Sex must be serious, otherwise it's not sexy. It's American, that attitude that sex should be fun."

So sinister-sinful-solemn is how he sees sex. Put that down, along with the whips and saddles decadence, to growing up in the sexual thunderclouds of Weimar Berlin. (He's been accused of being a fascist photographer, too.) He was twelve in 1932: his formative years were backlit by Nazi iconography. But the creative turnaround came in 1971, when he nearly died of a heart attack. After that, the work became more flagrantly perverse, erotic, personal: "He brought his own desire into the studio then," said Xavier Moreau, his agent in Seventies and Eighties Paris and New York. "That was what turned him into Helmut Newton."

I asked Newton about this via another creative turnaround, which happened a few years before his heart attack. "John Lennon said, 'I started being me about my songs after hearing Bob Dylan.' Did nearly dying start you 'being you about' your work?"

"I like that", said Helmut." Yes, something like that happened to me then. Taking photographs became the way I coped with things. My wife had a serious operation that upset me: I started photographing her. When I had something wrong with me, I used a camera. It helped. I photographed my doctors, and myself in the hospital mirror. I have a theory that in war, or any trauma, if a photographer has a camera between him and the horror, he can face it. If there's something that upsets me, I get my camera out."

So despite the high-voltage sex, it was the shadow of death that kick-started his trajectory. He is also a master of the theatrical shadow, and in theatre the light that matters is the one that casts shadow, defining characters by what's dark in them, and the way they darken others. Is that what his shadows do? "What does darkness mean to you?" I asked." Have you ever photographed theatre?"

"My wife was an actress when I met her" he said. "I photographed her productions. I love stage lighting. I was brought up with Twenties and Thirties American cinema lighting . The Marlene Dietrich look. I like hard light, which throws deep shadow on the face. Most photographers shun the midday sun: they like softness, twilight. I call that the shitty hour. I love the desert, when the sun is high and unforgiving in the sky. Thirties portraits of women with long lashes which throw black shadows on the cheek. I've just done Jude Law like that, in heavy shadow."

Art that just confirms how we see is useless. ("I hate good taste", says Newton. "It's the worst thing that can happen to a creative person".) And shock for the sake of it is trivial. Newton does neither. Some of the most recent pictures in the Barbican (like "Skeletons") are of X-rays. Newton has moved again, from unclothed to unfleshed women. He marched off his models, plus 3 million pounds-worth of diamonds, to a radiologist.

This is no vile sicko. I'm afraid he's stuck with being an artist, and a dedicated one, at that. For he is still, at eighty, exploring his subject, men's ways of seeing women. Still thinking up new ways to bring the darkness in his own male gaze to light.