#HELMUT NEWTON MANNEQUIN SERIES#

His figures and his decadent scenarios hark back to the vibrant, night-life of Berlin between the wars, which had so caught Newton’s imagination as a boy. “The perfect fashion photo,” he claimed, “doesn’t look like a fashion photo, but more like a film still, or a portrait or a keepsake photo – somehow like anything but a fashion photo.” His technique was always subordinated to the image, which, according to the photographer, he had carefully preconceived.

Newton extended the potential of editorial photography by drawing on multiple sources, adapting to his purposes the look of raw reportage, of film noir, and of suggestive surrealism. One thing seems sure, that this story, at once polished and perverse, pushes the boundaries in the twilight zone of power-games between male and female, naked and dressed. His subjects exude a powerful authority and frequently seem intensely engaged in a drama that appears to continue beyond the frame – a bigger story, left to the viewer’s imagination. Newton’s work brought together, with a single prevailing logic, the categories of fashion, portraiture, and the erotic. Against the prevailing conventions of the medium, he illustrated a diametrically opposed character – the self-assured, modern woman. While others focused on the specifics of the fashions, Newton explored their social and sensual undercurrents, guided by his unique, witty and provocative erotic compass.

While others confined themselves to the studio, he preferred to work with available light on location in authentic settings: from dark city streets and sophisticated, dimly-lit interiors to the sharp sunlight of the beaches of the French Riviera. While others still depicted the model as an anonymous mannequin, Newton’s models have character and he created radical images that told a story and evoked the lives and lifestyles of a certain class of woman. He was a pioneer who already in the 1960s was bringing provocative ingredients and richly layered narratives to subvert the conventions of fashion photography. The ownership rights of this vintage print are supported by an original agreement with Newton in 1984, and supplemented by a further agreement with The Helmut Newton Estate in 2012.Newton worked cleverly and tenaciously to impose his own perspective within the framework of the commissions he received from international fashion and related magazines, most notably and consistently Vogue, but including Elle, Queen, Stern, and Nova among others. This vintage fine art print comes with a Certificate of Authenticity signed by Norman Solomon.

#HELMUT NEWTON MANNEQUIN SERIES#

This collection of vintage prints were gifted to Newton’s agent Norman Solomon, in recognition of the work he had carried out in promoting Newton’s “Private Property” series of exhibitions in 1985. Image measures approximately 18.5'x 12' and is on a 16'x 20' silver gelatin sheet. Most were destroyed or written over, it is very rare to find them in immaculate condition. Always unsigned, they were sent out to major publications to stimulate interest in a photographer’s work. This is a rare pre-1985 original vintage print produced in small numbers from a series of transparencies that Newton considered his most provocative and important work through 1985. Image has been stored in archival container or framed at all times. Image was framed and displayed in our gallery and has slight markings on back and a small piece of hinging tape on verso. The unnatural form of the figure, uncommon perspective, and the contrast between the stillness of the figure and the movement of the world below was characteristic of Newton's imagery for the Yves Saint Laurent campaigns.

About In ‘Mannequin Toss, Paris 1978’, Newton recreates a surrealistic image taking direction from Yves Klein's seminal 'Leap Into the Void'.

Helmut newton mannequin