Helmut Newton Quotes

• 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.

  Helmut Newton

• They often ask me to shoot for them. But I say no. I think an old guy like me ought not take pages away from young photographers who need the exposure.

  Helmut Newton

• 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.

  Helmut Newton

• Technically, I have not changed very much. Ask my assistants. They’ll tell you, I am the easiest photographer to work with. I don’t have heavy equipment. I work out of one bag.

  Helmut Newton

• 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.

  Helmut Newton

• My job as a portrait photographer is to seduce, amuse and entertain.

  Helmut Newton

• 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.

  Helmut Newton

• 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.

  Helmut Newton

• 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.

  Helmut Newton

• 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.

  Helmut Newton

• 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.

  Helmut Newton

• 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.

  Helmut Newton

• 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.

  Helmut Newton

• I did find a wonderful girl last year, but the photographs that we did were more about motorcars.

  Helmut Newton

Helmut Newton (14)

Birth:	31st October, 1920
Death:	23rd January, 2004
Nationality:	Australian, German
Profession:	Photographer

About

Helmut Newton was born in Berlin, Germany. He was a German-Australian photographer. He was a "prolific, widely imitated fashion photographer whose provocative, erotically charged black-and-white photos were a mainstay of Vogue and other publications." Interested in photography from the age of 12 when he purchased his first camera, he worked for the German photographer Yva from 1936. He worked in Singapore and Australia during World War II, serving in the Australian army as a truck driver for several years. He later opened up a photography studio, and returned to Europe in the 1950s. In Paris he began working for French Vogue, and later Harper’s Bazaar, Playboy, Elle, and other publications during the 1950s and 1960s as his reputation grew, traveling frequently throughout the world on assignments. He increasingly focused more on these images rather than fashion photography in the 1970s, publishing several books of his work such as White Women, Big Nudes, and World Without Men.

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Today's Anniversary - 21st November

Births

• 1870 - Mary Johnston
• 1958 - Rickson Gracie
• 1943 - Philip Norman Bredesen Jr.
• 1971 - Michael Strahan
• 1952 - Lorna Luft

Deaths

• 1996 - Mohammad Abdus Salam
• 1945 - Robert Benchley
• 1959 - Max Baer
• 2000 - Sir Cyril Astley Clarke
• 1999 - Quentin Crisp