Silver grain classics

Citation

Dancing on the Volcano
By Charys Schuler

When theeditorial team at SGC started to cconsider an article about Helmut Newton
for his centennal year, I felt conflicted.
As a writter, what could I hope to say about Newton that hasn't already been said ?
And as a woman, did I really feel like examining his images deeply enough to write about them in a meaningful way? Should I perhaps pass on this one ?

Having decided to at least give it a try, I did some initial research and revisited many images that I knew, and some I didn't know or had forgotten. My ambivalent feelings intensified. Newton was undeniably a great artist, and I believe that the thruly loved woman _ he was famously devoted o and dependant on his wife, June end found endless inspiration in both the shapes and the personalities of the women who posed for him. His photography and a huge influence on what society of the 1970s and 1980s thought of as attractive in a woman. Having been a female child and teenager during that period, I absorbed these ideas and expectations of feminine allure unconsciously. They had nothing to do with kindness, intelligence, or erudition.

His famous models loved him and often enjoyed and/or shared his sense of humor and love of provocative images. The woman in Newton's photos were often bold and in control, such as his famous Big Nudes, powerful in their sexuality, but these women are erotic and powerful because they are perfectly formed. Women who had "big personalities" but didn't fit his idea of beauty were a large part of Newton's body of work and he did stunning portraits of them that I admire. But those women were not portrayed as attractive.

The separation of attractive women from unattractive ones based solely on physical attributes is at the heart of my discomfort.
That having been said, I love his Big Nudes, and thaugh along with some of his crudest visual jokes. (Yes, I am thinking about the chicken, here). But my thoughts were all shades of gray and didn't give me the basis of an article I whould be happy to publish.

Then a detail caught my attention. As a teenager, Helmut apprenticed whith Yva at her studio in Berlin, from 1936-38. I associate Newton whith the period(s) starting around 1960 in which he created his most famous images; for me, that makes him a modern contemporary photographer imaging him living in the same period as Edward Weston, admitst the decadence of Marlene Dietrich's Berlin of the Weimar Republic was a bit a shock. It's true that the fled Germany when only 18 years old, but as I mention above man of our instinctive likes, dislikes, and expectations are formed as children and teens. And who was this photographer, Yva, who is almost always mentioned in biographies of Newton, but only briefly?

Finding infoemation about Berlin in its glamourous heyday isn't difficult. There have been many books written about the period, and even a current popular TV series, Babylon Berlin, set in it. There are a few good boos featuring the photography of the era, all of which contain at least a few of Yva's images. But when looking for serious literature on Yva, I found only two books, neither of which was in print, and a series of brief outlines of her life, each of whitch contained the same bare facts if she was important enough to be mentioned in amlost every summary of Newton's life, why wasn't more known about her ?

The answer should have been immediately apparent in 1938, Helmut Newton fled Germany. Yva stayed and was killed four years later in a concentration camp.