Who’s Afraid of Helmut Newton?

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Art historian who gave up writing about art for the love of design, art curator, and minimalism lover.

is an artist, director, Doctor of Visual Arts. He composes images, constructs novels, and sketches essays. As he claims, "It's better than writing because photographs are faster than words." He studied at the Department of Cinematography and TV Production at the Lodz Film School, as well as art history at the University of Warsaw and Université Paris Sorbonne. He has 17 years of experience as a university lecturer. He has been photographing since the age of 13, and his series have been exhibited in Krakow, Warsaw, and Lodz, among others.

As long as people keep pointing out Helmut Newton’s kinkiness, it means his vision is working: questioning points of view, laughing at clichés and individuals who make strong statements about how we should live and who we should love, forgetting that we should love ourselves first. Just like the women in Helmut’s photographs.

On the occasion of Helmut Newton’s exhibition at CSW Znaki Czasu in Toruń, which you can now visit online, we spoke with Dr Matthias Harder, chief curator of the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin, and Marek Żydowicz, founder of the Camerimage Festival and co-curator of Newton’s show in Toruń.

When in doubt, ask the crocodile

Ania Diduch: I read somewhere that the nude in the photograph of the ballerina in the mouth of a crocodile is actually Pina Bausch herself. Is that true?

Matthias Harder: First of all, that is not a real crocodile.

AD: [laughing] No way!

MH: You would be surprised how people tend to take what they see as adequate. The crocodile is part of the scenography from the play Keuschheitslegende, which premiered in 1979. Helmut was sent by The New Yorker to make a feature about Bausch’s theatre in Wuppertal. What you see on the photograph is a theatre scene with one of the dancers posing for Newton. It is not a ballerina, it’s a male dancer. If you get closer, you can see the hair on his calves.

AD: That’s unusual! You don’t expect to see a male model all of the sudden in an exhibition full of female nudes.

MH: You really should not tru

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Ania Diduch:

Art historian who gave up writing about art for the love of design, art curator, and minimalism lover.

Wojtek Wieteska:

is an artist, director, Doctor of Visual Arts. He composes images, constructs novels, and sketches essays. As he claims, "It's better than writing because photographs are faster than words." He studied at the Department of Cinematography and TV Production at the Lodz Film School, as well as art history at the University of Warsaw and Université Paris Sorbonne. He has 17 years of experience as a university lecturer. He has been photographing since the age of 13, and his series have been exhibited in Krakow, Warsaw, and Lodz, among others.

Publish date: 26.11.2020

Also read:

Ania Diduch:

Art historian who gave up writing about art for the love of design, art curator, and minimalism lover.

Wojtek Wieteska:

is an artist, director, Doctor of Visual Arts. He composes images, constructs novels, and sketches essays. As he claims, "It's better than writing because photographs are faster than words." He studied at the Department of Cinematography and TV Production at the Lodz Film School, as well as art history at the University of Warsaw and Université Paris Sorbonne. He has 17 years of experience as a university lecturer. He has been photographing since the age of 13, and his series have been exhibited in Krakow, Warsaw, and Lodz, among others.

An anthology of out-of-focus photographs that became a masterpiece. An artist whose consistency predated the digital revolution by 50 years. An exhibition that was supposed to be a new opening and became a retrospective. Art historian Anna Diduch and artist Wojtek Wieteska discuss “Unseen”, an exhibition of Robert Frank’s work at the renowned gallery, C/O Berlin.

Anna Diduch: Robert Frank is a cult figure of 20th-century visual culture for me. But I am under no illusions that many people heard about him for the first time just one month ago, from the media coverage of his death. So I wonder seriously: who cares about Robert Frank these days?

Who’s Afraid of Helmut Newton?

Also read:

He Who Asks Doesn’t Photograph

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