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Why I don't like Helmut Newton
Aug. 4th, 2007 11:59 amYesterday, on our way to the zoo, Hisae and I visited Berlin's Museum for Photography -- which, since 2004, has been a shrine to Berlin-born, Hollywood-dead photographer Helmut Newton.
The building faces a statue of a Teutonic knight, a memorial for the fallen German warriors of World War One. If you follow this mournful knight's gaze into the museum lobby it's met by something much less apologetic in its aggression, much more steely -- the fuck-you glare of a series of vast Newton nudes hung halfway up the grand, symmetrical staircase.
I wanted to write something about the oddness of this museum, a place where aggressive yet strangely unsexy photographs of naked bodies have become a new sort of official culture, a place where nudity has become armoured, metallic, martial. Googling for pictures of the lobby, I discovered that in 1909 the same staircase had a series of images of soldiers in the exact positions the Newton nudes now occupy -- to very much the same effect.
Despite liking naked female bodies very much, I've always hated Newton's images. I dislike the place where fashion and SM imagery meet. I dislike "stylist sneer syndrome" -- the attempt to offset the passive subordination of the model by demanding she adopt an expression of arbitrary and spurious aggression, sometimes punky. I dislike Ballard's Crash and Tarantino's Kill Bill. In fact, I dislike anyone who thinks it's "empowering" to show women in various states of undress as castrating or killing machines. It's a particularly stupid male fantasy of a certain vintage. Ballard correctly stated, in a 1999 article for Bookforum about Newton, that "he desexualizes his subject matter. His photographs drain the libido from the once-charged spaces of the late 20th Century, from hotel bedrooms and luxury bathrooms, and from those penthouse apartments where unwatched porn films play behind the heads of people with more pressing concerns than pleasure or pain."
"'I’ve always liked the idea of cowboys" Newton told Index magazine a couple of years before he died " — the way they look, they way they walk, especially in the movies. Why? A cowboy stands a certain way. He’s got a gun here, a gun there, his hands are always ready to draw. So I make the girls into cowgirls — with their hands ready to reach for the guns. But I don’t tell them, I just show them. I stand for them. I show them exactly what they should be doing."
If they aren't cowboys, these nudes are 1940s pin-up girls painted on the side of martial aircraft, phallic tailfins from 1950s cars, terminators, replicants, robots, soldiers, extras in Robert Palmer's Addicted To Love video, Betty Page-style whipper-nannies. They stand in the hotel corridor, musclebound in underwear, suspenders and stilettos, with a withering look on their faces. "Suck my cock!" they're commanded to command, and then "Whoops, I don't have one!" and then "Damn this penis envy, I'm going to buy a pistol!"
It's one of the most pathetic fallacies of the Anglosphere that this vintage Teutonic-American fantasy figure -- think of Brigitte Neilsen with her peroxide crop and Pershing hooters -- is passed off as some kind of feminism. Policewoman feminism, I call it. It's the moment when TV cop shows ran out of steam in the 70s and some exec had the idea to do a cop show in which the cop was a woman. And so the tired old normative-authoritarian tropes not only got their wretched lives extended, they got to pose as some kind of lefty liberation. Women could be men too! Policewomen could be policemen! The pistol was the missing phallus! Screw this business of deconstructing patriarchy, just let us in! All of mankind will one day be men! Or, better yet, naked killer cowboys! Screw women! Yes, screw them! Plug them! Bang bang!
Add to "stylist sneer" and "policewoman feminism" the charge of "genetic fascism": as k-punk noted when Newton died, "the real elitism in Newton's images is not of gender, but of privilege and beauty. He lays down wreathes for a genetic aristocracy whose magnificence we plebeians can either revere or resent".
The Berlin Photography museum has a weird section called Helmut Newton's Private Property, where you can see locks of Newton's hair, his cancelled passports, ensembles of the clothes he was wearing when he received the Medaille D'Or from Jacques Chirac, a model of his living room, his old cameras, his bookshelves, and a film of him bossing a naked girl about, making her do his fetish poses, become his kind of cowboy. It's all, finally, a tribute to the penis-as-weapon, and yet it leaves the penis-as-desire buried in a cold metal sheath. Nudity has never looked less fuckable or -- in this museum -- more bullyingly public and official.
The building faces a statue of a Teutonic knight, a memorial for the fallen German warriors of World War One. If you follow this mournful knight's gaze into the museum lobby it's met by something much less apologetic in its aggression, much more steely -- the fuck-you glare of a series of vast Newton nudes hung halfway up the grand, symmetrical staircase.
I wanted to write something about the oddness of this museum, a place where aggressive yet strangely unsexy photographs of naked bodies have become a new sort of official culture, a place where nudity has become armoured, metallic, martial. Googling for pictures of the lobby, I discovered that in 1909 the same staircase had a series of images of soldiers in the exact positions the Newton nudes now occupy -- to very much the same effect.
Despite liking naked female bodies very much, I've always hated Newton's images. I dislike the place where fashion and SM imagery meet. I dislike "stylist sneer syndrome" -- the attempt to offset the passive subordination of the model by demanding she adopt an expression of arbitrary and spurious aggression, sometimes punky. I dislike Ballard's Crash and Tarantino's Kill Bill. In fact, I dislike anyone who thinks it's "empowering" to show women in various states of undress as castrating or killing machines. It's a particularly stupid male fantasy of a certain vintage. Ballard correctly stated, in a 1999 article for Bookforum about Newton, that "he desexualizes his subject matter. His photographs drain the libido from the once-charged spaces of the late 20th Century, from hotel bedrooms and luxury bathrooms, and from those penthouse apartments where unwatched porn films play behind the heads of people with more pressing concerns than pleasure or pain."
"'I’ve always liked the idea of cowboys" Newton told Index magazine a couple of years before he died " — the way they look, they way they walk, especially in the movies. Why? A cowboy stands a certain way. He’s got a gun here, a gun there, his hands are always ready to draw. So I make the girls into cowgirls — with their hands ready to reach for the guns. But I don’t tell them, I just show them. I stand for them. I show them exactly what they should be doing."
If they aren't cowboys, these nudes are 1940s pin-up girls painted on the side of martial aircraft, phallic tailfins from 1950s cars, terminators, replicants, robots, soldiers, extras in Robert Palmer's Addicted To Love video, Betty Page-style whipper-nannies. They stand in the hotel corridor, musclebound in underwear, suspenders and stilettos, with a withering look on their faces. "Suck my cock!" they're commanded to command, and then "Whoops, I don't have one!" and then "Damn this penis envy, I'm going to buy a pistol!"It's one of the most pathetic fallacies of the Anglosphere that this vintage Teutonic-American fantasy figure -- think of Brigitte Neilsen with her peroxide crop and Pershing hooters -- is passed off as some kind of feminism. Policewoman feminism, I call it. It's the moment when TV cop shows ran out of steam in the 70s and some exec had the idea to do a cop show in which the cop was a woman. And so the tired old normative-authoritarian tropes not only got their wretched lives extended, they got to pose as some kind of lefty liberation. Women could be men too! Policewomen could be policemen! The pistol was the missing phallus! Screw this business of deconstructing patriarchy, just let us in! All of mankind will one day be men! Or, better yet, naked killer cowboys! Screw women! Yes, screw them! Plug them! Bang bang!
Add to "stylist sneer" and "policewoman feminism" the charge of "genetic fascism": as k-punk noted when Newton died, "the real elitism in Newton's images is not of gender, but of privilege and beauty. He lays down wreathes for a genetic aristocracy whose magnificence we plebeians can either revere or resent".
The Berlin Photography museum has a weird section called Helmut Newton's Private Property, where you can see locks of Newton's hair, his cancelled passports, ensembles of the clothes he was wearing when he received the Medaille D'Or from Jacques Chirac, a model of his living room, his old cameras, his bookshelves, and a film of him bossing a naked girl about, making her do his fetish poses, become his kind of cowboy. It's all, finally, a tribute to the penis-as-weapon, and yet it leaves the penis-as-desire buried in a cold metal sheath. Nudity has never looked less fuckable or -- in this museum -- more bullyingly public and official.