Sorry for the lack of updates, but PyDS and my Pentium 133 are currently just a horrible combination, and it will takes some weeks until I get my main computer back.

He has been called a misogynist, a monster and a genius. He calls himself "a pretty weird guy." For decades, Helmut Newton has been changing fashion and photography with his shocking images of women. Now 80, he continues to shock, but with photos of leaders and landscapes.

[via: the cartoonist]

[Update]: fixed the link

Once I heard that Newton also does that, and he also has "an obsession with cutting out pictures out of newspapers". I also started taking notes and drawing sketches and it really seems useful because when shooting I often can't remember what I thought about before and having notes is great.

[...] When he does set up a shoot somewhere a little more louche, he goes to New York's Chelsea Hotel, where Sid offed Nancy and where Newton finds a black-eyed girl in junkie chic pensively mouthing a gun on the side of a bed. Newton's women often stick things in their lipsticked mouths, but it's more often a cigarette than an automatic. Or he heads to Wuppertal, one of the most fantastically ugly towns in Europe, where we find a naked Pina Bausch dancer (not, I guess, Pina herself), her body disappearing into the maw of a huge stuffed crocodile. The croc looks back with a dead reptilian stare, and I think of Newton's eye. Or he finds a woman in a bikini on a windy viewing platform, staring down into the vastness of the Hoover Dam. These are all women on the edge of the void, but this is photographic desperation, hardly an existential crisis.

These are scenes from unreal lives, glamorous, decadent fictions. Even Evi, the uniformed Beverly Hills cop, with her nightstick and mirrored shades and her unsmiling, can-I-help-you-sir expression, finds herself (or we find her) naked from the waist down in a double-take pair of images. Newton's x-ray vision undresses his models before our eyes. The paired double image of the clothed and unclothed is one of Newton's great inventions, even if Goya got there first with his Majas. Sie Kommen, dressed and undressed, is Newton's best-known play on the theme. Four catwalk models are frozen in mid-stride, on the blankness of a white studio backdrop. It is clearly a studio set-up and, in the uncropped version of the left-hand image, you see bare floorboards, a snaking flex, the edge of the paper whiteness on which they are immobilised. The right-hand image zooms a little closer. Same women, same poses. Except they're naked. They've kept their shoes on, of course, because where would a Newton model be without her heels? [...]