Helmut Newton can be grasped only with difficulty. Most of us believe we know his work, or at least its important aspects. Yet the German-Australian photographer left behind an oeuvre so influential and iconic that every systematic effort to come to terms with it with even the slightest claim to comprehensiveness is doomed to failure. It is probably the most published photographic work ever. It is at once of our time and timeless; even today, it disturbs and enchants us.

Newton arrived at his inimitable style in Paris in the 1960s, for example in a series of photographs of the then revolutionary fashion designs of André Courrèges that he took for the British magazine Queen in 1964. In retrospect it is clear that Newton needed a proper sparring partner: a meeting of kindred spirits was the requirement for a congenial fulfilment of the assignment and ultimately it opened the door to the avant-garde. This symbiosis was repeated later in his intense collaboration with Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld, Anna Molinari and Thierry Mugler. The high expectations and occasionally strict conditions of his clients were for him also an incentive to oppose traditional modes of representation. Newton’s female models appear singly or in groups, sometimes lascivious and elegant, sometimes anarchic and playful. Such fashion images confound and provoke magazine readers; at the same time, they subtly comment on the contemporaneous demonstrations in Europe’s metropolises and the radicalisation of bourgeois youth. In Newton’s case, however, one can never be certain where reality ends and the illusion begins. He always found inspiration for his presentations in real situations.

A street scene from Paris became one of the most famous fashion photographs of all time, published in the September 1975 issue of French Vogue as part of a multipage editorial with photographs depicting Yves Saint Laurent’s haute couture collection of 1975–76. This shot has been published repeatedly ever since; it is timeless and iconic, so refined and enigmatic that even today it appears in very different contexts. The series of photographs that appeared in Vogue at the time was composed exclusively of night-time scenes, several in colour and others in black-and-white; the model was always seen on a street. The French Vogue, Rue Aubriot motif would later be shown as a life-sized print in Newton’s exhibitions across the world; the composition of the photograph does not just work in magazine format. He photographed the scene in the eponymous street in the Marais district of Paris; his residence is seen in the background. The woman with her short, dark combed-back hair is standing, smoking, in a narrow, sparsely lit residential street; she is wearing a slim-fit pantsuit by Yves Saint Laurent—a design that was quite revolutionary for its time and properly illustrated by Newton’s photograph. A certain ambiguity resonates here because, in the 1970s, prostitutes presented themselves at night in the Marais to the gaze of their potential clients—and so the seemingly unapproachable woman in Newton’s image appears, on the one hand, modern, fashion-conscious and self-confident but, on the other hand, one asks who she is really waiting for. With this enigmatic miseen- scène, Newton was probably also alluding to the Berlin paintings by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner from the early 1910s in which cocottes smoking on Pariser Platz await their customers. Kirchner, like Newton later, placed the fashionably dressed women in a tense relationship between prostitution and a modern, urban lifestyle; between frivolity and elegance. The photographer was adding another level of reality which at the same time could be just a daydream, and in this way he opened up a nearly infinite space for associations.

Of course, Newton’s photograph from the rue Aubriot also recalls Brassaï’s portraits of prostitutes of the 1930s, which he also took in the Marais. Just a year later, by the way, Newton took several night shots of models playing prostitutes there for Playboy, under the title Love for Sale—a direct homage to an older colleague he admired. Again and again during his lifetime, Newton managed to find creative spirits as allies, as editors-inchief of magazines who accepted and published his unusual visual ideas. This iconic work is part of the upcoming retrospective show “Helmut Newton. Legacy” at his Berlin-based Foundation and published in the accompanying book by Taschen.