Helmut Newton

By Richard Lacayo

When he died last week after losing control of his car and crashing it into a wall, the photographer HELMUT NEWTON, 83, deprived the world of one of its most inventive reprobates. In the 1970s his spike-heeled women, cold but carnal, introduced to fashion photography the idioms of black leather and deluxe European decadence. The son of prosperous Jewish parents, Newton fled from Hitler's Germany to Singapore, where he took up the camera, then to Australia, where he was discovered by Vogue. In London and New York, he developed the louche, provocative style of his breakthrough 1976 book, White Women. By bringing raw sex to glamour and anger to Eros, he displayed one of the defining sensibilities of the '70s and beyond. Feminists--and not just feminists--complained that his images degraded women. He insisted that women were always in the saddle, even when his women, cool and glaring, just might be pictured wearing one.

--Richard Lacayo