contessanally: Venice - Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore - Le Stanze della Fotografia - Helmut Newton

Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore

Le Stanze della Fotografia - Helmut Newton - Legacy

A vaporetto ride right across from the Piazza San Marco on the magical Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore at Le Stanze della Fotografia - the retrospective exhibition - Helmut Newton. Legacy - until November 24 - curated by Mattias Harder, Director of the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin and Denis Curti Director of the Artistic Director of Le Stanze della Fotografia - on the occasion hundredth anniversary of the photographer's birth.

"His passage in the lagoon is documented serval times, as can be seen in the report for Queen magazine in 1966 or in the portrait of Anselm Kiefer, immortalized in a fascinating palace on the Grand Canal."

Matthias Harder

Head of the Helmut Newton Foundation

Helmut Newton - Mirella Petteni - Queen - Venice - 1966

Self Portrait - copyright - Helmut Newton Foundation - courtesy - le Stanze della Fotografia

"I am not an artist'

I am a photographer."

He was born in Berlin as Helmut Neustadter, but the world knows him as Helmut Newton. Born into a wealthy Jewish family he was forced to leave Germany due to racial laws and decided to embark for Australia, where he opened a small photographic studio. In Melbourne he met June Brown, stage name Alice Springs, an actress, photographer and muse, with whom he shared an emotional and professional journey.

Helmut Newton - Self-portrait. Monte Carlo - 1993

The retrospective - Helmut Newton. Legacy - is the most complete exhibitions of one of the most loved and discussed photographers of all times. With more than 250 photographs, polaroids and archive documents, the exhibition retraces through the decades the immense legacy left by Newton, an artist who always knew how to live up to his bad reputation. Among iconic images, a corpus of unpublished works that reveal the lesser-known aspects of the photographer's work and specific insights into the most unconventional fashion shoots.

Helmut Newton - Queen - Courreges - Paris - 1964

Helmut Newton - Elle - Paris - 1969

"The Newton method is even clearer in the Venetian exhibition. He produced works for his clients, but then devoted a space of personal experimentation to those same works. This is how many of his shoots came about, which would make history and can be admired in the exhibition itinerary."

Denis Curti

Denis Curti and Matthias Harder

curators

"Women are so much stronger than men

in whatever situation."

Helmut Newton - Yves Saint Laurent - Rue Aubriot - Paris -1975

The title of the exhibition evokes the immense legacy left to posterity which can be retraced in the exhibition, which recounts the career of a protagonist of the twentieth century who left a mark in fashion - as demonstrated by the collaborations with Vogue magazine and with stylists such as Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld, Thierry Mugler and Chanel - but also in the new way of approaching the female nude, witnessed in his famous Big Nudes - above. The cult book from 1981 collects 39 black and white shots, many present in the exhibition, pioneers of a frontier of photography not yet explored, that of the blow-ups and human-sized shots.

Helmut Newton - Big Nude I - Lisa - Paris - 1980

"Photography is always a way of seducing."

Helmut Newton - Arthur Holland Perfume - Paris -1983

"Helmut Newton can be grasped only with difficulty. Most of us believe we know his work, at least its important aspects. Yet the German-Australian photographer left behind an oeuvre so uniquely influential and iconic that every systematic effort to come to terms with it, with even the slightest claim to comprehensiveness, is doomed to failure."

Matthias Harder

Director Helmut Newton Foundation

Helmut Newton - Vogue France - Monte Carlo - 1980

photo Matteo De Fina - courtesy - le Stanze della Fotografia

Exhibition View

Newton also became famous for his capacity to capture the personality of those he has in front of him in a photo and he has demonstrated this by immortalizing fashion designers, musicians and artists, such as Gianni Versace, Andy Warhol, Charlotte Rampling, Romy Schnieder, Catherine Deneuve, Mick Jagger, Nastassja Kinski, David Bowie, Elisabeth Taylor - above - and Arthur Miller, to mention just a few.