Fashion a risque business for photography legend

Photographing Myer’s “hat of the week" in post-war Melbourne hardly seems like the ideal launch pad for a meteoric career in international fashion photography. German-born Helmut Newton (born Neustadter) was making his way in Australia after being interned here as an enemy alien. After all, a job was a job.

Newton, born 100 years ago tomorrow, was the son of a wealthy Jewish button manufacturer in Berlin. Newton was loaded with selfconfidence and chutzpah. He fled Germany in 1938, taking two cameras with him. Newton had been interested in photography since the age of 12, so he wasn’t going to leave his special tools behind.

During the rise of Hitler but before the war broke out, Newton’s father had been imprisoned for a short time in a concentration camp before escaping to South America with Newton’s mother.

Not everyone in Newton’s circle was so fortunate. Sadly, the photographer to whom Newton had been apprenticed, Else Simon (aka Yva), was murdered by the Nazis in a concentration camp in 1942.

Young Helmut got out of Germany like his parents. But he had other ideas as to his destination. He caught a train to Trieste and from there journeyed to Singapore where he worked briefly for the Straits Times as a photographer.

He left before the fall of Singapore and arrived in Sydney on the Queen Mary in 1940. After a period in Tatura internment camp in Victoria, where he volunteered to clean the toilets because it gave him much of the day off, Newton spent five years in the Australian Army and was naturalised in 1946.

In 1947 while shooting Myer’s hats, Newton met the young actor June Brunell. She was the model under the hat, and when Newton married her in poses on her hands and knees on a bed while wearing a Hermes saddle on her back.

In 1990 Newton was awarded the French Grand Prix National de la Photographie, and more accolades would follow as the years went by.

In 2000 a retrospective exhibition of his work opened in the New National Gallery in Berlin before touring to cities including London, New York, Tokyo, Moscow and Prague.

The New York Times wrote, when Newton died at the age of 83, that he had an “unquenchable taste for the risque”. Others condemned his work, like writer Susan Sontag. She had confronted Newton on television and found his imagery degrading to women. No doubt she was thinking of Newton’s photographs of models in orthopaedic corsets, or on all fours in dog collars.

No matter what anyone might think of his work, Newton is today one of the most famous photographers of all time. His pictures have featured in glossy magazines around the world and his models or subjects have included Isabella Rossellini, Charlotte

Rampling, Grace Jones, Claudia Schiffer, David Bowie, Jerry Hall, Raquel Welch and Sigourney Weaver, among countless others.

In 2003 Newton made plans for his Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin, which was opened the following year and continues to this day. A living museum, housed in a former military officers’ casino, it shows Newton’s work alongside that of other well known photographers.

Newton died in 2004 after crashing his Cadillac into a wall near where he was staying at the Chateau Marmont, a hotel on Sunset Boulevard, Los

Angeles where he customarily spent the winters.

To die so close to the native haunts of many of his glittering subjects could never have been imagined by the young photographer making a living out of hat photography in Melbourne after the war. Or perhaps, given his mountainous self-belief, Helmut Newton would have expected nothing less