Helmut Newton Exhibition: Cars
A shoot for French Vogue in the early 1960s featured a red Fiat 1200 as a backdrop, while in 1963 Francoise Sagan was portrayed in a Jaguar E-Type, also for French Vogue. Meanwhile Jean Shrimpton found herself transformed into the hood ornament of a Rolls Royce – miniaturised and collaged via a piece of darkroom trickery – in a fashion shoot for British Vogue in 1966.
Newton also utilised car-centric settings, such as the Jaguar factory in Coventry, for a men’s fashion shoot for Adam magazine, while he also shot a project for the same title from the back seat of a Facel Vega sports car, shooting outward across the dashboard. In Rome he had a model emerge through the sunroof of a Fiat 500 for Italian Vogue, while for French Vogue he created a large-scale photographic sequence telling the story of a mysterious young woman whose Mercedes-Benz 190c is inspected by customs officials at the French-Belgium border: check out Cambridge Jones’ evaluation of one of the images from this sequence in his regular PP podcast piece.
Throughout the 1970s, 80s and 90s Newton continued to utilise such unusual narratives, often as a sub-text for a fashion story, but also with commissions from car manufacturers, such as an advertising campaign for the New Beetle, created in Milan in. 1999.
One of the highlights of the current show is the first-ever presentation of a fashion photograph taken in Como, created in 1996 for Italian Vogue, which features a blonde woman with heavily teased hair wearing a tight black cocktail dress standing next to an Alfa Romeo Spider. With the boot lid open it’s possible to see a briefcase stuffed with bundles of 100,000-lira banknotes. The sports car carries a licence plate from the city of Como and the story behind this cache of banknotes is, of course, a matter of speculation. However, it is a strikingly characteristic and ambivalent element in Newton’s fashion imagery.
