Helmut Newton, Polaroids, Galleria Carla Sozzani, Milan

HELMUT NEWTON
Impressions
Polaroids
Galleria Carla Sozzani, Milan
3 October - 10 November 1996

Polaroids. Helmut Newton exhibits his unseen Polaroids to the public for the first time. Taken during a number of sessions since 1989, these are quick snapshots that strike us with immediacy. The polaroid is a technical medium quite congenial to the artist because, as he says, “I’m impatient to see what my photo will look like: I grab the camera […] and simply press the button.” The speed of this photographic process allows him to capture a situation, an expression, a momentary sensation that would lose its spontaneity and freshness with a slower technique, at the same speed as the human eye.

Impressions. 30 ink prints measuring 1.20 m long or high, depending whether the image is horizontal or vertical. None of them has ever been published or exhibited before. They were printed by Helmut Newton by putting together various works of his from different times in his archives in Monte Carlo. Newton says that this project, which began on August 19 and was completed on September 20, 1996, is his most innovative work. They are “impressions” inspired by the quick-fire language of the sexy and sometimes pornographic writing in magazines such as “True Crime” and “True Detective”, or the novels of Chandler and Spillane, whom Helmut Newton admires greatly.

Torsos 1994, 6 silver gelatine prints measuring 1.20 x 1.20 m, exhibited for the first time in Italy. They are imposing nudes inspired by the classical statuary of antiquity and Delamare’s sculptures of the Thirties, full-scale black and white photographs taken in the Nineties featuring bold angles and rigorously white backgrounds that emphasise the clear chiaroscuro of the bodies. In the same room we may admire 2 nude portraits of Kristen McMenamy measuring 1.50 x 1.20 m, which Helmut Newton printed for the first time for this exhibition in Milan.

HELMUT NEWTON

Helmut Newton was born in Berlin in 1920. At the age of 16 he was apprenticed to famous Berlin photographer Yva, renowned for his fashion photos, portraits and nudes. In 1938 he left Germany to live in Singapore, where he worked for the Singapore Straits Times. He then moved to Australia, where he met June Brown: wife, friend, lover, inseparable advisor. They settled in Paris in 1957. In the Sixties and Seventies Newton worked for Nova, Queen and Stern as well as for the French, American, Italian and British editions of Vogue magazine. He held his first solo show in Paris in 1975. He has been presented with numerous awards: the 1976 Art Directors Club of Tokyo award for best photograph of the year and, in 1977-1978, the American Institute of Graphic Arts award for his first book, White Women. In 1978-1979 he was presented with a gold medal by the Art Directors Club of Germany for best news photograph. In 1981 he moved to Monte Carlo. In 1989 he was appointed “Knight of arts and letters” by the French Minister of Culture Jack Lang. In the same year he also received the “Photographers’ Award for Outstanding Achievements and Contributions to Photography During the Sixties and Seventies” from the Photographic Society of Japan. French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac presented him with the “Gran Prix National de la Ville de Paris.” In 1991 he was awarded the “World Image Award” in New York for best photographic portrait, and the following year the German government presented him with a prize and he was appointed “Knight of arts, letters and sciences” by Princess Caroline of Monaco. He has held exhibitions all over the world. He now lives and works in Monte Carlo and Los Angeles. Few famous people today have not been immortalised by his ironic, talented lens: from Catherine Deneuve to Elisabeth Taylor, from Mick Jagger to Jack Nicholson, from Paloma Picasso to Charlotte Rampling. But it is above all his monumental black and white nudes that strike the collective imagination and present a new image of woman that has emerged since the Eighties: cold and confident, dedicated to the cult of the body and aware of her erotic impact. In these shocking images of athletes and amazons we find both the expressive power of the cinema and a decadent opulence bounding upon fetishism, an aggressive and transgressive imagination, a surprising and unmatched elegance. His most famous photographs are marked by the most explicit and the most ambiguous sexuality. Galleria Carla Sozzani presented a series of his portraits of women in 1993 (January 14 to February 27).

Galleria Carla Sozzani
Corso Como 10 - 20154 Milano, Italia
www.galleriacarlasozzani.org