Helmut Newton. SUMO. 20th Anniversary Edition

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And one of his legacies is the commingling of couture with explicit eroticism in magazines like French Vogue, Elle and Stern, and bringing stylish soft-core pictorials to the pages of Playboy. Neustädter (he later changed his name to Newton) was born on the 31 st of October 1920 into a prosperous Jewish family in Weimar, Berlin. During the course of a career spanning five decades, Helmut Newton became regarded as one of the world's leading photographers. Published in an edition of 10,000 signed and numbered copies, the SUMO sold out soon after publication and quickly multiplied its value. In defiance of the much-loved Japanese discipline that inspired the title of this colossal work, there is no need for its proud owner to wrestle with SUMO.

His almost cinematic compositions provided a hyper-real backdrop for the provocative images of sculptural, larger-than-life women, and enhanced the themes of voyeurism and fetishism that run throughout his work. Newton lost control of his Cadillac after leaving the Chateau Marmont Hotel and climbed up a wall across the street.Hugh Hefner said that Newton, “used his fashion photographer’s eye to make the erotic almost surrealistic. The pictures were enjoyed for their titillating fantasies, alluding to sexually charged power tussles between prey and predator, which he imagined and constructed. In 1975, when the New York Times chief art critic Hilton Kramer argued that contemporary fashion photography was becoming a sub-division of pornographic culture (“chilling in their taste for perversity and violence”), he singled out Newton’s boundary-pushing pictures as “so clamorous and unsavory that the pictures insist on being judged by the standards of another genre. It re-asserted print culture, for one thing, because its publication coincided with the release of the first handheld ebook readers. The Sumo book set new standards, published in a limited edition of 10,000 signed and numbered copies, it sold out soon after release and quickly multiplied its value.

The world of fashion photography was changing, and Helmut Newton would lead the change for the next two decades. The meeting was not a success – she took offense to a light-hearted comment by Newton – and the portrait was never taken. Newton left the magazine before the end of his contract and went to Paris, where he worked for French and German magazines. Or as Jodie Foster opined, Newton brought to the female nude a new language of strength, instead of being passive it’s very active. If Newton’s work was controversial, I believe it’s because he expressed the contradictions within all of us, and particularly within the women he photographed so beautifully: empowerment mixed with vulnerability, sensuality tempered by depravity.Newton shot a number of pictorials for Playboy, including pictorials of Nastassja Kinski and Kristine DeBell.

Newton worked primarily with black and white film, mainly shooting Kodak Tri-X, TMax 100 and TMax 400. Legendary SUMO copy number one, autographed by over 100 of the book's featured celebrities, also broke the record for the most expensive book published in the 20th century, 0 g. I do a lot of my work at midday, even in the desert, because I adore hard light, whether I’m working on fashion, portraits, or nudes. His bold, seductive and controversial style continues to influence many brands, photographers and advertisers today.

Mine was a highly sexual woman, in all respects Western, whose native habitat was Paris, Milan, and maybe New York. Newton started his career with an apprenticeship with photographer Else Ernestine Neuländer-Simon, known as Yva, whose surreal portraits and provocative nudes inspired Newton throughout his career. He also worked in advertising, shooting various campaigns for the likes of Yves Saint Laurent, Chanel and Versace as well as non-fashion brands such as BMW and Absolute Vodka. Anna Wintour describes his work for her magazine as “synonymous with Vogue at its most glamorous and mythic. kilos, Newton created a landmark book that stood head and shoulders above anything previously attempted, both in terms of conceptual extravagance and technical specifications.