One immediately recognizes a photograph by Helmut Newton. It is as if he had invented a world, his own, unlike any other, and a singular photographic style, totally mastered, Apollonian, almost cold. And, from Newton, the collective imagination has retained a triumphant, solar iconography, made of women in glory, athletic, powerful and desirous, of an icy eroticism, of Californian swimming pools à la David Hockney, of sumptuous palaces, of furs and jewels. In short, the world of the rich.

But less known is the dark, Dionysian side of the work: the satire of the rich and powerful, the elaboration of an eroticism of darkness, where SM rituals are played out, minerva, prostheses, and the enslavement of the body, and which opens up the apparent apollinism of the images to the Dionysian wound. Up to the staging of “doubles” with Freudian strangeness, “flayed”, real-false corpses, murders. To the cruel lucidity, finally, of his look at the aging of bodies – including his own, which was confronted with illness.

Above all, and all the more so because he has said very little about it and has always refused to make it his stock in trade, we ignore the fact that the young Helmut is first and foremost a Berlin Jew who escaped the Nazi extermination, whose life has constantly replayed the mythical figure of the wandering Jew and who found in Paris, his city of choice, the place where he could finally put down roots, after Singapore, Australia, London and Los Angeles.

And it is precisely in the light of this Jewishness, never claimed as such but painful, that the author wanted to re-examine the Newtonian corpus: witness the powerful women’s bodies that turn out to be a replica of the Aryan body glorified by Nazism, the fetishism of uniforms, leather and helmets, the obsessive presence of dogs, or the portraits of Léni Riefensthal, the muse of the Third Reich.

But Newton never made a bitter or angry complaint about this “Germanic” disaster: he chose, on the contrary, to magnify it.

About Dominique Baqué

Dominique Baqué is a former student of the École Normale Supérieure, a philosophy graduate, an academic and a writer, and the author of numerous articles, prefaces and essays on art.