Helmut Newton Quotes
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I was lucky to have my wife as the art director, and it turned out to be quite something - a great success. I'm very proud of it.
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Look, I'm not an intellectual - I just take pictures.
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The point of my photography has always been to challenge myself, to go a little further than my Germanic discipline and Teutonic nature would traditionally permit me to.
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What I find interesting is working in a society with certain taboos and fashion photography is about that kind of society. To have taboos, then to get around them that is interesting.
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I like photographing the people I love, the people I admire, the famous, and especially the infamous. My last infamous subject was the extreme right wing French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen.
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It's quite true that what I am aiming at, even when I take portraits, is to get a scandalous picture. I would love to be a paparazzo.
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Technically, I have not changed very much. Ask my assistants. They'll tell you, I am the easiest photographer to work with. I don't have heavy equipment. I work out of one bag.
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Genius and taste don't go together.
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It began when I was so ill that there was a good chance of dying. I promised myself that if I survived I would never again pander to a magazine's requests or follow the ideas of art directors. I would only make images which were personal, which arose out of my own life.
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I hate good taste. It's the worst thing that can happen to a creative person.
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Some people`s photography is an art. Mine is not. If they happen to be exhibited in a gallery or a museum, that`s fine. But that`s not why I do them. I`m a gun for hire.
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Photography is 10% inspiration and 90% moving furniture.
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The desire to discover, the desire to move, to capture the flavor, three concepts that describe the art of photography.
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I did find a wonderful girl last year, but the photographs that we did were more about motorcars.
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I find myself, after all these years, with a built-in safety-brake that stops me from doing certain things. And one of the reasons why I want to try so called hard pornography - I don't even know whether it's hard enough - is to see whether I will be able to overcome this. Because if there is one thing I hate, it's good taste, to me it's a dirty word.
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It's that I don't like white paper backgrounds. A woman does not live in front of white paper. She lives on the street, in a motor car, in a hotel room.
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I have always avoided photographing in the studio. A woman does not spend her life sitting or standing in front of a seamless white paper background. Although it makes my life more complicated, I prefer to take my camera out into the street... and places that are out of bounds for photographers have always had a special attraction for me.
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I am very attracted by bad taste-it is a lot more exciting than that supposed good taste which is nothing more than a standardized way of looking at things.
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My job as a portrait photographer is to seduce, amuse and entertain.
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In my vocabulary there are two bad words: art and good taste.
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...what I try to do is a good bad picture. I work it out very carefully, and then I do something that looks as if it went wrong.
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You should feel that, under the right conditions, all women would be available.
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The photographs don't arouse me. All I can think about is the hard work it took to make them.
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My women are always victorious.
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In the photographs themselves there's a definite contrast between the figures and the location - I like that kind of California backyard look; clapboard houses, staircases outdoors.
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Some people's photography is an art. Not mine. Art is a dirty word in photography. All this fine art crap is killing it already.
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I like photographing women who appear to know something of life. I recently did a session with a great beauty, a movie star in in her thirties. I photographed her twice within three weeks and the second time I said: "You're much more beautiful today than you were three weeks ago." And she replied: "But I'm also three weeks older.
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There must be a certain look of availability in the women I photograph. I think the woman who gives the appearance of being available is sexually much more exciting than a woman who's completely distant. This sense of availability I find erotic.
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They often ask me to shoot for them. But I say no. I think an old guy like me ought not take pages away from young photographers who need the exposure.
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There are two dirty words in photography, one is art, the other is good taste
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