刚去世的一个摄影师，给Vogue拍过很多照片。。。

Helmut Newton and the Invincible Woman (New York Times)
By GINIA BELLAFANTE

Published: February 3, 2004


Of all the scenes Helmut Newton created for his camera during the half-century he worked as a fashion photographer, none manage to sum up his world view as cogently as one he took for French Vogue in 1994, which pits a woman against a roast chicken. Here, plump-fingered, bejeweled hands tear at a well-glazed bird as if it were about to unleash 1,000 locusts from its cavity. Newton was no champion of cozy domesticity. Start succumbing to nights at home with a warm dinner, a nice guy and a bottle of Burgundy and you forfeit all those life-affirming chances to act out scenes from "The Night Porter" in a musty hotel somewhere not on the Connecticut shore.

Newton, who died two weeks ago in a car accident in Los Angeles at the age of 83, used to enjoy saying that he was not an intellectual and did not stand for much. But certainly he stood against anything that might get in the way of a woman's sexual gamesmanship. The women in Newton's pictures almost never cultivate the attention of men. The attention comes naturally, either by way of their nonchalance or the glamorous oddity of their Valkyrian physical presence or both.

In a typical Newton image a woman is turning her head away from the lover who is desperately trying to lay claim to her. She will smoke her way through an attempted seduction, though she is hardly ever seduced. Newton liked to position seminude women next to men armored in the costume of a suit. But it is always the men, so naked in their amorous ambition, who are rendered vulnerable to dangerously uncertain outcomes.

Newton's photographs have been subject to all manner of misinterpretation, especially in the 1970's when the women's movement understood most fashion images, particularly those of unclothed women taken by men, to be victimizing. Moreover, his opus offers women in neck braces, harnesses and leg casts and at least one wheelchair. In "Helmut Newton," his talked-about 2003 autobiography, he explained this proclivity in one line, saying that he simply liked the look of Erich von Stroheim in "The Grand Illusion."

But what seems to have motivated Newton is the notion of female triumph over adversity. The women to whom he attached prostheses and other contraptions looked just as empowered as the ones he dangled from helicopters. There was no limit in his mind to female power.

Newton, as is well known, was born to a wealthy Jewish family in Berlin in 1920 and set off to China in 1938 to escape Nazi persecution. "My mother was very capricious, but around 1935-36 she became a tower of strength," he wrote in his memoir. "The strength had left my father. I could see that." His mother engineered the release from Germany that saved his life.

After stints in Singapore and Australia, where he met his wife and creative partner, June, Newton moved to Paris in the 50's to pursue the photography career he had begun as a teenager. He long betrayed a fascination with the kind of female body that did not come into vogue until the 90's. A weak little boy, emasculated by his mother's insistence on dressing him in girlish velvet suits, Newton fetishized articulated musculature in women. As Phyllis Posnick, the executive fashion editor of Vogue, put it, "He'd always say, `Don't send me any of your scrawny, undernourished models.' "

But Newton's influence on fashion extended beyond an interest in certain physical types. The ethos of decadence pervasive in Tom Ford's work is attributable in some part to Newton. Countless loopily reductive advertising campaigns — Mario Sorrenti's women with dogs in leather masks for Ungaro — and bad fashion shoots can trace their lineage to Newton, too.

Perhaps what young imitators miss is that Newton understood what motivates a beautiful woman to gussy herself up. In his photographs women lose their cool when they are in the company of other women. The catfights he staged were not as much pornographic fantasy or camp play as they were a realization that women judge themselves most severely against members of their own sex. If contemporary fashion photographers are plunging into the psychological byroads of the female mind, it has been pretty easy to miss.