The setting seems to visualize a Ieap backward in time; the stage is a darkened palace room with high ceilings and tall windows. Silk tapestries on the wall with ornamental patterns, heavy curtains slightly opened to give an almost theatrical Iighting effect, richly ornamented wood furniture, the traditional portrait in oils and a wooden sideboard create an impression of the ancien régime, highlighting, as it seems, a journey back into France’s glorious past. In the foreground, in contrast, a Iess elegant but very contemporary performance:
a man filming a woman. Concentrating, he Ieans toward the woman who is stretched out in front of his camera, supporting herself with her arms in an apparently strenuous pose. He is dressed, probably too warm with the scarf around his neck; she is nude, a blanched, scorched nudity from the strong light on her body. He is filming, she is exhibiting herself and being observed. The complementarity of their actlons is expressed in the mutual triangles formed by their thighs. Their legs seem to emerge from the same black-and-white stiletto-heeled shoes. Also, the streaking of his severely combed-back hair is picked up in her Iong, flowing mane and in the tassels of his scarf, whlle the waves of her hair are matched by the way the scarf hangs. The two seem bonded together Iike Siamese twins, even if only during this mutual act of reciprocal seeing and presenting. A depiction of the complementarity of voyeurism and exhibitionism. “Ensayo sobre ‘Voyeurisme’, Los Angeles 1989" is the caption in the Spanish catalogue.1 The explicit theme of the photograph is voyeurism, a practical and theoretical study of a principle which, strictIy understood, applies to photography as a whoIe, even though much more clearly expressed in the work of Helmut Newton than elsewhere.

lt is a Newton photograph with all the elements of his pictures, but here he has obviously chosen to reflect or explicate his own work. Originally taken for Playboy, a bulwark of voyeurism, its manner of execution makes it completely unclear whether the display was meant for private pleasure or commercial exhibition, whether it took place voluntarily or under coercion. lt has all the comments and complexity that Newton treasures — disjunctions, discrepancies, the functional uncertainties he must Iove, since this is what Iends his pictures their enigmatic presence. But the gap we mentioned at the start, the Ieap back in time, is neutralized again by the subtitle: Los Angeles 1989. The voyeuristic desire and exhibitionistic willingness shown are therefore not much younger than the velvet of the curtains. In the realm of images, every chateau, no matter how real, instantly appears as a backdrop, as staffage — built up exclusively for the self-rejuvenating word of “prime-tlme" images.
Two other pictures by Newton have the same title. At first glance, one Iooks more innocent, but also more inscrutable, more complex. We see two rooms; through an anteroom and a half-opened door, we Iook into a dressing room with ceiling-high mirrors. Two women and their reflections in the mirror, and the mirrored face of a third woman, are the actors, along with a hanging raincoat, scat- tered clothes, stockings and accessories. A curvaceous young model, naked except for stockings and shoes, who has turned toward the door, a bit surprised and frightened, is evidently Iooking at the intruding third woman; a somewhat older, opulent, enticingly dressed woman is seated and is gazing — through a monocle, as it seems — at the young woman (or her attractions); and the third woman, whom the observer sees as part of a strange, unfocused still-Iife in a round dressing or shaving mirror, has an androgynous or even male appearance with her combed-back dark hair, dark sunglasses and raincoat. She reminds one of a detective or peeping-tom. Three female types, three generations perhaps: innocent youth, the wise, tutoring and craving woman, and the figure whose gaze is hidden and who is perhaps playing a masculine role. lt seems t0 be an educational piece, an exercise in seeing, being seen and Showing oneself. Education in the dressing room. The framed Vogue print on the wall is purposefully cropped off after the Ietters VO and may now be read as the beginning of “voyeurism“.

A third example of a reflective Helmut Newton is a closeup with avery forceful effect. At closer distance than usual, only an arm’s Iength from the lens, another well-built young woman is posing. Her gaze, with a trace of reverie, is directed above and beyond the camera, apparently at the face of man whose presence is seen in his intervening arm. Her dress is half open and is being draped by the man to expose one breast. Her posture is somewhat unresolved. Leaning back slightly with crossed, almost closed Iegs, she has a hesitantly defensive look; her gaze and her breast, however — the bare breast forms the centre of the square-shaped picture — and the top of her stockings invite our scrutiny. ln addition to several sexual references, allusions and symbols, such as the chandelier, which can be construed as a phallic Christmas tree with its artificial candles, and the dozens of film boxes like unpacked presents, which together with the half-opened dress offer a field day to voyeurs, the picture is constructed in such a way that the observer Iooks at it from the point at which both the camera and genitals of the invisible man are Iocated. In no other known photograph by Newton is the voyeuristic gaze so closely connected to the act of photographing and the male genitals. Her eyes are on the face of the intruding male, while our gaze is first at the central breast and then moves up or down. The act of Iooking is explicitly understood as sexual: “Le regard est I'e’rection de l'ceil" (Jean Clair). The various film boxes —TMAX, Kodacolor, Ektachrome, Fuji, etc. — the complete palette of colour and black-and- white, of fast or grainy film material illustrates the construction, overIoading it with quantity. Conspicuous is also the man’s arm, which, with a wristwatch, crosses the picture diagonally, pointing beyond the breast to a stone female bust, so as to appeal to tranquillity in the midst of our hectic pace, reminding us of eternity amidst the here- and-now, of the unchanging, the archetypal female in the presence of this immaterial beauty who appears as a photographic product, perhaps as thin as the paper.

These three photographs from his “late period" are not the first to address voyeurism, but the inclusion of this theme in the captions was probably never so explicit before. Newton, who often in response to questions said he was a voyeur and that a photographer who didn't admit this was an idiot,2 Newton the mover and shaker who has
always smiled at theorizing, has set up here, not without pleasure, his own benchmark, has established a theoreticaI/thematic retrospective. His oeuvre is full of autobiographically tinged photographs. Whereas some of these pictures fall into the category of frivolous self—portrayals, other photographs, such as the famous Self-portrait with June and Models and Valentino PIace, Los Angeles 1987, are serious efforts at self-reflection. Victor Burgin, in his essay “Espace pervers",3 placed the Self-portrait at the beginning of his discussion, emphasizing the complexity of the pictorial oonstruction, the additive repetitions, chiasmus-like exchanges and crossings on the descriptive and the connotative Ievels.

Here, Helmut Newton has created a surfeit of mutually complementing and contradictory pictorial elements: Newton is dressed, even overdressed in a raincoat, white tennis shoes, and with a twin-lens Rollei; the model with her back toward us and reflected in the mirror is naked except for her black high heels; besides the two standing figures are the two seated minor figures: June, his wife, clothed, with crossed Iegs, and a hidden model, of whom only the bare Iegs and black stiletto heels are visible; tossed to the floor, as so often, are a light blouse on a dark background and a dark blouse against white. Two figures are busy, in motion, the other two waiting, somewhat bored. The standing model emphasizes her stretched position with the “pin-up pirouette”4 of her arm and hands, in contrast to June, who is holding her head somewhat listlessly, her arm resting on her knee. Newton, the man behind the camera, stands invisibly in the viewer's position: in the Iimelight of the action, in the realm of the model.

He is presenting himself in his capacity as a photographer, as an onIooker, in the ambivalence of voyeur and exhibitionist, as a “subject caught up in his own wishes or image."5 Inside — in the picture within the picture — everything is mirroring and reflection, outside — where June sits in a director’s chair — there is transparency, permeability, sortie, or an escape from the nexus of signs and their reflections. Victor Burgin interprets this scene, along with Laura Mulvey, not only as voyeurism but as an identification with the object of desire, as objectification, fetishization.6 The model has become a stiffened figure, an alabaster statue: solidified desire, externalized phallus.

Valentino PIace, Los Angeles 1987, viewed by Serge Tisseron in analogy to Manet as Newton’s Olympia,7 merits a final close examination. Placed in the background in terms of the perspective, in the upper portion of the picture and yet at the centre of attention, a woman is lying stretched out on a quilted batiste bedspread. Her position is emphasized by several elements: wavy tuIIe curtains frame the elevated bed, helping to create the impression of a stage detached from the foreground (the auditorium), bathed in an almost celestial light from above. Unusually for Newton, the woman seems to be stretching, dissolving herself, Iosing herself in physical lust, in her own desire. Her skirt has slid up to the tops of her thighs. Newton himself sits in the Ieft foreground like a theatre spectator observing his starlet (his projection) on the stage, also stretched out, but casual and not noticeably aroused. The symmetry is perfected by a make-up table on the right, with paper cup, tape recorder, books, a satin dress, the picture of a dog sitting and a mass-produced sculpture of a panegyric female figure. The sculpture creates an analogy to the stretched-out woman, the dog to the seated Newton. Newton is observing, with one hand on his chest and the other on a cable release. He appears hardly moved, only she seems to be in the process of dissolution: discarded polaroids on the floor and the telephone next to her on the bed secularize and commercialize the setting, transforming possible intimacy into public exposure. The idealization takes place only on the make-up table and is expressed in the form of kitsch.

These five examples, although exaggerated, show Newton, the fashion, erotic and portrait photographer, although he constantly mingles these genres, to be a reflective photographic artist. Five examples on the theme of voyeurism, which themselves contain little of the seductive force that would automatically turn the viewer into a voyeur. The object of desire has already been claimed: since someone is already Iooking, a stand-in assuming the role of voyeur in the picture, the observer sees him and the scene itself as a closed entity, sees his gaze and desire, and experiences himself as one reflecting from a distance.

Helmut Newton is a man of action, not indecision. The classical “Newtons” accent the power of seductive play, arouse curiosity, stlmuIate slumbering desire (certainly in male and probably also in female observers). Developing tendencies are identifiable, both in the style of his voyeurism — from the well-known form of distanced, sharing-without-participating viewing to intervention, when in the age of polaroids and video visual desire becomes the experience of the evening, the theme of subjects of a scene — as well as in the style in which the models, the women, present themselves to “devouring” eyes, the way in which the relation between distance and proximity, warmth and coId, openess and c|osedness‚ shifts. Nevertheless, for the moment we shaII stick to the general concept of the “classical Newton”.

At an initial Ievel, these photographs have a simple and direct, almost “functional” effect. Whereas the descriptive, cognitive photographs are constructed mostly as visual fields in which many details intensify into a multilayered fabric of nexuses, the “true” Newtons are not constructed as fields or surfaces, but as depths. In the familiar form of perspective viewing as potential seizure, they always have one motif in the foreground, in the centre of the picture: a woman, a model (a distinction Newton makes between woman and commodity), a couple, a breast, a shoe, etc. This motif — whether humans or accessories makes no great difference, since what is important is not the objects or the people in themselves but only the figure of seduction — are presented against a background, a wall, the interior of a usually richly furnished house, the city; and often a gloomy or dark background. Against these backgrounds, a spotlight or flash illuminates the motif. A similar aesthetic was found in theatre before the minimalistic phase, in film before the neo-realistic renaissance (The Third Man, for example, or Erich von Stroheim’s films, or Fritz Lang’s Metropolis), and in Weegee’s police photographs. AII these pictures are dominated by strong bIack-and-white contrasts; certain elements, traces, tracks, or the actors are glaringly illuminated, everything else vanishes hopelessiy into the darkness of time. The principle of voyeurism needs this alteration between Iight and darkness. When everything is bright and visible, the engine of fantasy, of desire, grinds to a halt. The classical voyeur prefers to sit in the shadows, in a darkened auditorium, and behind the illuminated setting and between the props it is also dark. Here the voyeur’s fantasy unfolds, oscillating between seeing and imagining. Newton does his staging on Iocation almost exclusively with Iighting effects (and from the viewpoint of the “eyes”)‚ adjusting the Iighting to the extent to which the model is undressed. He stages realism. In one of his black-and-white photographs, mounted policemen are tracking down two women in the undergrowth in broad daylight, and similarly his photography acts as if it has just discovered a motif, as if it had taken someone by surprise in a secret, private actlvity (but with a slight delay, which is why the women are hardly surprised). And this tracking down always seems somewhat strained, just as the eyes smart when they are suddenly blinded by Ilght. Thus far his choreography is simple. Yet here already the fissures emerge, since the illuminated scenery does not always appear quite so realistic, lt allows the artificiality of the staging to shine through — for example the two women, one whipping the other.8 Before we Iook at these breaks, however, we must first examine how Newton tracks down his motifs: in the brightness of daylight streaming into the room, in the glitter of large chandeliers, in the sparse light from a street Iamp, or in the photographer’s flash-gun, we perceive a naked woman in high heels, a woman and her mirrored reflection, a woman with another woman, a woman and another woman impersonating a man, a woman and a dog, a woman and a mannequln, a woman and an automoblle part, a woman and banknotes, a naked woman in a dark street, a woman with stockings, with prosthesis, with chains, with a pistol, with a plaster cast, in fetters — women in every imaginable state, only not in working situations; women in all possible functions of male fantasies, always women, only rarely does a man play a part, since he could block the projections, and we also seldom see groups or group photos, as in the belatedly published Saturday Night, Orange County, California 1983,9 and with only few exceptions the women always appear strong, self-conscious, “masters of the situation", play the stronger sex, are prepared for sexuality, already entangled in their own dream, their own fantasies. lt is a Iascivious, cool, dlsreputable and elegant Iady who leads us through the world of Newton’s imagination.

Walter Seitter has drawn attention to the prominence and “metonymies” of this juxtaposition of the “associated”, which needs another person or the opposite sex, but where an animal or a statue can also suffice.10 This doubling of often antithetical pictorial elements does not serve to alienate sexuality, to reify it, or even to transform or revoke it. These combining or contesting couples arouse curiosity and awaken latent images in the beholder. They function as stimulants in the staging, they prevent the woman portrayed from ever being a nude in the classical sense of figure studies or as naked in the biological sense. A fur emphasizes the nakedness of the woman it clothes, dark streets make a woman's nudity appear as an urge to expose herself, a woman with open Iegs and an attacking Alsatian dog emphasizes the animal side of sexual passion (beyond what society tolerates), discarded clothing or even a whip augment the concept of sexuality with the important aspects of violence and passion. Stockings and straps are the aesthetic guardians of the secret centre of the earth. The women are not dressed in an everyday manner but are outfitted for a profane sacrament or for battle.11

One of these objects, instruments or, to be more modern, machines deserves a closer Iook, although it is part of the classical inventory of erotic photography: the shoes or stilettos that represent something Iike the elixir of Iife in Newton’s photography. It is difficult to find a woman in Newton’s pictures who is not wearing high heels. This sub- ject has been treated in great detail, from the Iashed feet of the Chinese to the helplessness of women in stiletto shoes. lt is to Newton’s credit that he has introduced new semantic aspects to the wearing of shoes: the women seem to be wired, Iike a plug in a socket, the current and energy flowing freely. lt is obvious that the shoes in many cases are not meant as devices for walking but instruments to stir up the imagination, as weapons in the daily effort of self-assertion, not to be compared with protheses for supporting the weak but as swords which men once wore, or as thorns in one’s own flesh. The women wearing them never appear helpless; instead, the pictures suggest that the shoes magnify the strength already present. On the other hand, however — these shoes have several reciprocal interpretations — they cause the women to solidify, transforming the Iiveliest action into staging, to poses, and the women wearing them into statues, as if they had been cast into these forms.12 Walter Seitter and Dominique Baqué correctly emphasize this solidification in their essays.13 Seitter points out the affinities with neo-CIassicism, to sculpture-creating cultures — Newton’s women are indeed never romantic, never Biedermeier-Iike, never Sarah Moon-Iike, and there is always a waft of violence and latent aggression in the air.14 Baqué uses Nietzsche's welI-known distinction to show that Newton’s women and settings are always Apollonian and never Dionysian, that his women never lose themselves in excitement, are never consumed by their passion (never become informe, as Bataille has put it), but that they always maintain their form, beauty and composure, that they are therefore not erotic in themselves but only exhibit the signs of eroticism.15 Newton’s women all have one or more accessories of male fantasies, but as a rule they do indeed appear selfcontained, maintaining the integrity of their own form, and are never directly confrontational, not even toward the viewer: “They look at no one directly."16 This Iends distance to the settings, it solidifies them.

To recapitulate and expand, Newton uses the aesthetics of flashes of light (even without his flash-gun) as if he were a society photographer, a Weegee of eroticism, a paparazzo and detective in one person. For this instant aesthetic, it is quite fitting that the flash illuminates the forbidden, mysterious domain of the rich and beautiful, that we can experience a small portion of their environment and amusements: in 1/250th of a second, the object of voyeuristic Iust and the subject of our own desire appears, with a bit of atmosphere added. Newton is a new type of court photographer for our present-day courts. The dark expanses into which Iight shines underscore the pro- hibited, the crime which the photographer or his subjects are engaged in — even if it is only the “crime”, the luxury, of truly having time for the sexual — the expanses Ieave room for projected digressions. In contrast, the illuminated figures appear unsurprised, do not react at all, but continue doing what they want to do, continue to pursue their own thoughts and fantasies as if there was no disturbance; often the captured moment is so strong that the diverse quality of the photographic technique, the choreography of the portrayal, the model and the background create a complex, often paradoxical, ambience. In doing so, Newton largely avoids the trap of the “imaginary realistic" and achieves the “symbolic”.17 Newton thus shatters his own illusion of reality, creating in its place an ambivalent and fascinating world of images. He shows not only “woman and” but also “woman as”: woman as a sexually aware being, woman as the stronger sex no Ionger in need of a man, as a person combining strength and sexuality (Big Nudes and World without Men), sexuality as a power play; he thus creates visual metaphors which transcend a merely voyeuristic and pornographic approach, which aIIow us to Iook at the photographs many times, even to examine them for longer periods. lt is also this disjunction that aIIows a comparison with the suspense of Hitchcock. A setting full of tension. A stylized theatre with the realism of an actual setting, which despite the touch of violence leaves the observers unthreatened, confronting them merely with their own moral concepts.

This was true in the mid-eighties in any case; since then, the Newton canon seems to have shifted once again. In his magazines and in the publication Archives de nuit a stronger realism is evident, an intensification in his approach to the world, to the situation, to sex. Several explanations are possible: this is the way he is now taking photographs; or he has drawn on other, previously unpublished photographs from his archives; or he is trying to create connections between sex and power, between sex and money, sex and religion, between the private and public, in a number of pictures (in “Pictures from an Exhibition", for example) that suggest a macabre, perverse, cruel but also more passionate world. The photograph Siegfried becomes an image of animal obsession, power struggles; fellatio in the picture In a Penthouse narrows the optical effect from erotic fantasy to the pornographic gaze. But what is also visualized is an unaffected, relaxed, unbiased sexuality, which was not yet admitted in the subdued eroticism of the Iate seventies. The series with Fräulein Petra, who appears dissolved, informe, despite the “Fräulein" and changes of shoes from scene to scene, the picture Smoking Nude, and especially the reposed and shoe-Iess model in 3 p.m. in Bel Air all suggest a free expression of sensualness and sexuality that Helmut Newton and his form of public expression did not previously permit; they finally also suggest a self Iiberated from staging and Iiturgies.

The voyeur in the true sense is a participant without direct consequences. Voyeurism as a mixture of dream and reality is the visual realization of dreams, fantasies, desires — which are more realistic than dreams and Iess painful, less problematic and injurious than reality — and a visual realization of the fundamental principle of a
society in which the dominance of the visual, the visible (the photographic!) super-sedes all other senses and their objects, e.g. tangible material, and makes of all of us observers in the darkness. Since, however, the visible, the action illuminated by blinding lights, must supplant all other impressions, including that which in reality smells, reeks, or can be tangibly explored, it is forced again and again to escalate up to the pain threshold of the eye and the spirit. What type of voyeurism will Newton — who has always had the energy and imagination to keep pace, always near the borderline of what is publicly acceptable, who has strongly influenced the artistic climate for two decades — offer to the more painful nineties? 

1 Helmut Newton, Nuevas Imagenes, p. 82, exhibition catalogue for the exhibition of the same name in the Sala de Exposiciones de la Fundacion Caja de Pensiones, Madrid 1989.

2 Victor Burgin, “Espace pervers", in Art Press, Spécial, La Photographie — L’intime et Ie public, no date (1990), p. 64.

3 Ibid., pp. 62ff.

4 Ibid., p. 64.

5 Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories, 1980—1985, Munich 1989, p. 9: “lt is not the figure of seduction that is mysterious, but the subject caught up in his own wishes or image."

6 Laura Mulvay: “Cette seconde possibilité, Ia scopophile fétichiste, construit la beauté physique de l’objet transformant celui-ci en quelque chose de satisfaisant en soi.” Quoted from Burgin, op. cit., p. 66.

7 Serge Tisseron, “Le myste‘re de Ia chambre invisible — À propos d'Helmut Newton", in La Recherche Photographique. L'Erotisme, No. 5, 1989, pp. 83ff.

8 lnterior, in Helmut Newton, Sleepless Nights, p. 69.

9 See Helmut Newton's Illustrated, No. 2, 1987

10 Walter Seitter, “Helmut Newton lesen", in: S. Gohr and J. Gachnang, Bilderstreit, exhibition catalogue, Museum Ludwig, 1989, pp. 185ff.

11 Ibid., p. 127.

12 Ibid., p. 126.

13 Dominique Baqué, “A corps perdu", in La Recherche Photographique, No. 5, 1989, pp. 73ff.

14 Klaus Honnef, “‘lch bin ein guter Beobachter von Leuten‘, Helmut Newton und seine Welt", in Helmut Newton, Portraits, Munich 1987, p. 8.

15 Baqué, op. cit., p. 75.

16 Tisseron, op. cit., p. 88.

17 Seitter, op. cit., p. 126. Seitter sees, for example, a number of references and motifs from the Song of the Nibelungen in Newton’s photographs.