Lot142 N11733 Helmut Newton Walking Women, Paris
Helmut Newton’s monumental triptych Walking Women, Paris (1981) embodies his unique manner of synthesizing allure, style, glamour and sexuality that revolutionized fashion photography by subverting the tradition of models existing as hollow vessels for clothing. At t.mes s controversial, Newton's boundary-pushing photographs evolved from similarly provocative works like Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and Edouard Manet's Olympia in their unflinching depictions of the female form.
Prior to his now notorious series Big Nudes, begun in 1980, Newton heavily favored on location photo shoots, dropping his models into sumptuous interiors or staging them in lavishly designed outdoor settings. Thus, his series of straightforward, full-bodied nudes, devoid of narrative and photographed against plain backdrops within a studio, marked a distinct shift in Newton’s approach to the figure-environment relationship. By removing distracting elements, Newton explores the model's physical form as a solitary representation of strength, provocation, and power. The images of the present triptych were captured during the same photoshoot and the same models as his similarly iconic diptych Sie Kommen, Paris. The title translates from German to an ominous They Are Coming. The storm of Amazonianesque models march forward in Sie Kommen, one frame focusing on the women’s tailored, high fashion outfits and a mirror image boldly confronting the viewer with their starkly nude figures in identical poses. In Walking Women, Paris, Newton achieves a sense of bewildering lateral motion through the dynamism of the models’ overlapping forms, subtly changing poses, and unwillingness to grace the viewer with their gaze. Newton described the preparation for this shoot in his 1992 photobook Pola Woman. Whereas painters draft in sketchbooks, photographers often use the immediacy of Polaroids to quickly test exposure and composition. Although Newton typically made only a few preparatory Polaroids, one notable exception was for Sie Kommen (Naked and Dressed).
“It's more important to me to spend the t.mes in getting something on real film. There was one exception! When I worked on “The Naked and the Dressed”, maybe the most complicated series of photos I have ever produced, I used boxes of the stuff. My assistant stood next to my camera and shot as many polas as he could at the same t.mes as I photographed so that I could be sure to get the same movement for the second version. One must realize the difficulty in matching the same movement of legs, feet, hands, heads and expressions when a group or even only a single person moves rapidly in front of the camera-and also the fact that the t.mes lag between each version is often as long as two or three hours.”
As in Sie Kommen, there is one essential exception to the nudity in Walking Women, Paris: the models' high heels. The vestiges of an outfit, the shoes’ presence enhances the seductive and provocative elements of the scene. In his fetishization of the heel, the models appear almost more nude because of the deliberate choice to accent the models only with shoes. Newton's models exist not as Botticelli’s barefoot nymphs wandering the woods; rather, they strut as powerful, modern, and unmistakably Newtonian–women. Throughout his oeuvre, Newton played with opposites: clothed and nude, active and passive, voyeur and participant. In Walking Women, Paris, Newton contrasted motion and stillness. He employed photography’s unique power to freeze t.mes and capture, as Henri Cartier-Bresson would describe, a “decisive moment.” Therefore, his choice of presenting the work as a triptych amplifies the moment and allows for a heightened and paradoxical sense of motion. With the photograph enlarged to nearly life-size scale, subtle differences in the three frames present themselves as the viewer traces each model’s path across the scene. The women are presented against a neutral white background, which creates an unending fantasy where their forms sweep across the three panels for eternity.
“For me his life is a triptych. There is the Berlin of his youth, his spiritual home, then there is the unknown, mysterious Australian period, and following that the last quarter of a century since his arrival in Paris in a Porsche.”
Newton traces his interest in decadence to growing up in 1930s Berlin working for acclaimed German photographer Yva (Elsie Neuländer Simon) and consuming popular publications like Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung. In 1938 Newton and his parents fled their native Germany to avoid rising antisemitism in the lead up to the Second World War. After briefly working as a news photographer in Singapore, Newton was sent to Australia by the colonial British government where he served in the army for five years. In 1946, Newton opened a photography studio in Melbourne and was introduced to his future wife June Browne. Working as a professional photographer under the name Alice Springs, June was Newton's confidant, inspiration, and greatest advocate. By 1981, when Walking Women, Paris was made, the two had relocated to Monte Carlo—Newton’s status as a celebrated photographer cemented by years of his work published in Vogue, Playboy, and Harper’s Bazaar.
Newton’s provocative images from this period coincide with the embrace of sexual freedom as a pillar of new-age feminism. While the reception to his provocative images was not always positive during his lifet.mes —critic Susan Sontag famously derided his self-professed adoration of women as how “the executioner loves his victim"—Newton’s work unquestionably encourages frank discussions about the implications of a highly sexualized society, the obsession with voyeurism in today’s visual language, and fashion photography’s position within contemporary culture.
