German - Photographer | October 31, 1920 - January 23, 2004
My job as a portrait photographer is to seduce, amuse and entertain.
Helmut Newton
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It's that I don't like white paper backgrounds. A woman does not live in front of white paper. She lives on the street, in a motor car, in a hotel room.
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I spend a lot of time preparing. I think a lot about what I want to do. I have prep books, little notebooks in which I write everything down before a sitting. Otherwise I would forget my ideas.
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I have mixed feelings about those sorts of things. When I see it done by interesting young people, I think it's very valid. But when established photographers, people in their forties, copy me and get a lot of money, well, I find that to be very stupid.
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I used to hate doing color. I hated transparency film. The way I did color was by not wanting to know what kind of film was in my camera.
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Well, it takes a certain amount of money. And I've got to see pictures of the person ahead of time. If I don't like the way the person looks I won't do it.
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The whole series is black-and-white, so when I went to shoot one of the women I only had black-and-white film with me. She had reddish hair and was a very pretty girl, a nice girl.
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I did find a wonderful girl last year, but the photographs that we did were more about motorcars.
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I like photographing the people I love, the people I admire, the famous, and especially the infamous. My last infamous subject was the extreme right wing French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen.
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I was lucky to have my wife as the art director, and it turned out to be quite something - a great success. I'm very proud of it.
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In the photographs themselves there's a definite contrast between the figures and the location - I like that kind of California backyard look; clapboard houses, staircases outdoors.
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People gave us everything for free. We were allowed only so much film per picture, but there was no limit to the creativity. I like to say that they let us loose like wild dogs in the streets of Paris.
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