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Portrait of the photographer as a dirty old man?

Not so fast, says documentary about Helmut Newton, whose female subjects revel in the sense of power they felt being part of his work

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Boundary-pushing photographer or pervert with a camera? However you view Helmut Newton – or perhaps, philistine like me, you barely know the man and his work – the documentary Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful from Gero von Boehm is likely to challenge your views.

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Going into the film, I thought it was going to be a litany of the late photographer’s famous subjects pushing back from the #MeToo era. (Newton died in 2004.) But the reality proves more complicated.

Model after model – Charlotte Rampling, Isabella Rossellini, Claudia Schiffer, Marianne Faithfull and more – talk about Newton’s professionalism, his sense of humour and, notably, the sense of power and agency they felt being part of his work.

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“He was a little bit of a pervert but so am I, so it’s OK,” says Grace Jones, who clearly had a blast working with the man. She recalls that he kept complaining that her breasts were too small for his liking, but that he kept calling her back to his studio nonetheless. Like many of his nude portraits, his images of Jones transmit a sense of raw female power.

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Helmut loved chickens

Not everyone agreed. In a 1979 interview on French television, Susan Sontag said his work was misogynistic. When he replied that he loved women, she shot back: “A lot of misogynistic men say that. I am not impressed. The master adores his slave. The executioner loves his victim.” The work speaks for itself, she concluded.

As a viewer, I found myself wavering between opinions. I was troubled by the Nazi-esque echoes in the work of this German photographer, but then (I told you I went in knowing little) learned that he was Jewish, that his first photography mentor had died in the camps, and then he himself fled the country in 1938.

Even so, he was influenced by the Nazi artistic aesthetic. “Helmut photographed women as Leni Riefenstahl would have photographed men,” says Rossellini. And in a sneaky move, he once shot French National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen to create an unflattering echo of a portrait of Adolf Hitler.

Regarding that photo: “He was a psychoanalyst,” says Sylvia Gobbel, who also posed for him. But then we also hear from longtime Vogue editor Phyllis Posnick that “Helmut loved chickens.” Clearly he contained multitudes.

Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful is available July 23 at virtual cinemas including Hot Docs Ted Rogers, Vancity, Cinéma Moderne and the Art Gallery of Hamilton. Details at filmswelike.com.

3 stars out of 5

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