Playboy: Helmut Newton - Hardcover

Newton, Helmut

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 081185065X ISBN 13: 9780811850650

Publisher: Chronicle Books, 2005

Synopsis

Following Playboy's celebrated fiftieth anniversary Photographs and Cartoons comes an arresting retrospective of Helmut Newton, one of the 20th century's most influential photographers. Renowned for his carefully composed, almost cinematic shots, Newton's signature style makes for a dramatic counterpoint to the Playboy nudes known the world over. Collected between shimmering metallic covers are more than 150 color and black and white photographs. Here we see Newton's take on Playmates in Los Angeles, Nastassja Kinski playing out a fantasy with a doppelgnger doll, a Lolita-esque travelog, and more. With a foreword by Hugh M. Hefner, an introduction by celebrated writer Walter Abish, and an afterword by Playboy's director of photography for the past 30 years, Gary Cole, Playboy: Helmut Newton is the definitive book of Newton nudes.

About this title

About the Author

Helmut Newton was born in Berlin in 1920. His family fled to Australia in 1938, where Newton served in the army and began work as a photographer. He died in Los Angeles on January 23, 2004.

Gary Cole has been photography director of Playboy since 1975.

Hugh M. Hefner is editor-in-chief of Playboy magazine.

Walter Abish is the winner of an Award of Merit Medal from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His most recent book is Double Vision: A Self-Portrait.

Reviews

It's no surprise that Helmut Newton shot stylishly soft-core "pictorials" for Playboy for nearly 30 years. After all, Newton's fashion photography was famous for its dark eroticism, its suggestion of dominance and submission amid the silk and heels of Vogue and Elle. But it is surprising to realize that most of the 160 images collected in this volume fall substantially short of Newton's best work. Though Hefner's foreword rightly observes that Newton "used his fashion photographer's eye to make the erotic almost surrealistic" and that his centerfolds were "curiously unsettling," a great erotic shot requires not only artistic skill and vision, but also a suitable model. And Newton's fetishistic vision didn't always mix well with the demeanor of the typical Playmate. As Abish notes in his excellent introduction, "the unfeeling female of [Newton's] imagination is a familiar icon of the Berlin cabaret." She descends from Marlene Dietrich, not Marilyn Monroe. In the series where Newton got the right models for his vision—Kristine De Bell in "200 Motels," Nastassja Kinski in "Kinski Exposed," Uschi Obermaier in "Bed and Board"—the results are hot and haunting. In ones where he didn't, the results may be unusually stylish for Playboy, but they aren't much compared to Newton's better work—a distinction that will hardly keep most Playboy fans from wearing out the pages of this book. (Nov.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Chronicle Books
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 081185065X
• ISBN 13: 9780811850650
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176