I think for most photographers, as for most artists, they're tapping into things that
they feel but they couldn't articulate and they might deny if you said, I think this
is about the oppression of women.
Nudity became an important theme in fashion photography in the 1960s.
As you can see here in this image, it was very tasteful and although it pushed boundaries
beyond the kind of ladylike fashion models in couture dresses, it was still mostly acceptable
to an international audience.
As a result, in the 70s, fashion photographers began to push things further.
In the 1970s, photographers such as Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdain, and Chris von Wangenheim
started to create a new kind of fashion photography that mixed sex and violence in a very provocative
way, one which attracted considerable criticism so that the art critic, Helmut Kramer for
example, said that it was a kind of pornography involving violence, extreme sexuality, and
even murder.
Initially, feminists hated them and they said all these women are just sort of characters
like paper dolls for male sexual fantasies, but then a younger generation of feminist
critics started to say, well, maybe, sometimes, but they can also be in a sense liberating
for women because they are focusing on the idea of women having sexual agency themselves.
The phallic woman per se is more of a male sexual fantasy, but some of the power and
authority in that image is very often things that women themselves want.
This actually, this Chris von Wangenheim image was an advertisement for Christian Dior jewelry
and you can see that actually right next to the Doberman's teeth is a little bracelet
which is the ostensible purpose of this image.
Probably the most influential of these photographers, though, was Helmut Newton.
As you go through the wonderful exhibition of fashion photography that's on display
here, you'll see a lot of Helmut Newton's photographs.
It works very well then that he's one of the central topics of my talk today because he
was so important in creating this very aggressive, highly sexualized fashion photography.
Here for example is an image that he did for French vogue and it's the kind of thing that
made him the idol of younger photographers like Chris von Wangenheim.
Obviously the photographer and or the stylist are not conscious of all the, certainly of
all the messages that they want to get across with the image.
Helmut Newton I think was more conscious that he was emphasizing certain sexual stories.
If you look at his autobiography, he's quite open about that.
As a matter of fact, Helmut Newton and his style of photography became the focus of an
entire movie which is, as I know many of you are cinema students and cinema enthusiasts,
the eyes of Laura Mars is on the one hand a very poor film, but on the other hand it's
a wonderful fashion film.
Back during the 10 years that I taught fashion history, every year I would show this film
to my students because it was caught so much of the aggressive sensibility of the 70s fashion
photography.
Also the models in the movie are with the fur coats just like that previous Helmut Newton
shot, the lingerie, the jewelry and they're in the background are burning cars and they're
fighting aggressively, etc.
All of those things being aspects of the photography that Helmut Newton pioneered.
The idea of car crashes, of girls fighting, the whole cat fight motif.
It is the car crashes and the idea of the conjunction between Eros and Thanatos, love
and death, was central to not only his work, but the work of another perhaps even darker
photographer, Guy Bourdain.
Here you see two images that Guy Bourdain published in French Vogue in the 1970s and
the one that's closer to me is uncharacteristically aggressive.
With Guy Bourdain, we find a much more, I think you would say, passive aggressive style
of presentation.
Whereas Helmut Newton showed women as being Amazons, and here he shows his classic image
of the rich bitch and fur coat, but giving a black power salute, I mean this is a total
Helmut Newton thing where he's mixing up all kinds of power and violence imagery.
His women are aggressive, dominatrix type women.
By contrast, Guy Bourdain splits the female persona into two parts.
Once in a while he will have the aggressive femme fatale in the sort of quote unquote
masculine role, as here the standing figure in fur, like Venus in furs, in black, very
vertical, but more typically Bourdain focuses on the passive female lying down, often appearing
to be unconscious, sometimes even appearing to be dead, and associated not only with white,
but also with lingerie and being stripped, and thus in a sense much more powerless.
Now Guy Bourdain, like Helmut Newton, had started working in the 1960s for fashion magazines,
but Guy Bourdain was always focusing on this image of vulnerable women.
In fact his single most famous series of photographs were for Charles Jourdan's shoes, when he
showed what appeared to be the aftermath of a car crash with white tracing of a body on
the street, and then a shoe tossed off onto the highway as though a woman had died in
a car crash and only her shoe was left.
This focus on passivity, implicit victimization, and even death was very much part of Bourdain's
style.
There's a lot of, potentially a lot of different meanings with covering different parts of
your body.
We saw in these pictures all the open mouths, which are all kind of give-it-to-me expressions,
the clovered mouth and Guy Bourdain's about fear and shock.
The covered eyes can be fearful, but they can also be a kind of erotic come on, but
also a sign of castration, I mean there's all those kind of Veronica Lake images where
you're only getting one eye, which for psychiatrists is very ambivalent.
It casts the woman as being both temptress and also castrated.
So again, just to emphasize this, so you'll always be able from now on to recognize the
helmet Newton versus the Guy Bourdain, or the ones that are inspired by them, because
all of these contemporary photographers that you see today draw on their work, another helmet
Newton, of course, Paloma Picasso, this sort of Amazonian woman, and Guy Bourdain, this
is from the 80s from French Vogue, and very often his women were just lying in the grass,
almost like sort of the disposed bodies of victims of serial killers.
He did a series actually where it appeared that women were dead lying in the grass, and
all you could see were their legs and shoes, again the shoe focus.
Bourdain's models testify that he was extremely sadistic working with them, and constantly
reduced them to tears, to fainting, to exhaustion, and it was only when they had completely collapsed
that he got the images that he wanted.
Meanwhile, Helmut Newton used a lot of very obvious sexual symbolism.
So in this 1968 image, you get all of the phallic symbolism of the plane rocketing upward.
This is uncharacteristic for Newton to have a woman lying down, but all the phallic symbolism
compensates.
More importantly, though, what Newton and Bourdain and their crowd did was introduce
a whole new series of characters to the repertoire of women in fashion photography.
Traditionally, in the 1950s and 60s, the characters in fashion photography were the
pretty happy girl, the elegant society lady.
Suddenly under Newton's influence, you had new characters, the prostitute, the lesbian,
the transvestite, all kinds of sort of perverse and fetishistic images.
Here for example, Helmut Newton photographed a dress by Nina Ricci for French vogue, but
he shows it on a model posed at night, on the street, just sitting on a parked car.
The obvious inference is this can only be a prostitute waiting for customers, and indeed
we see a car pulling up from between the columns.
This is very typical of the kind of mise en scene that he created, and that still today,
look at any copy of Italian vogue, has a huge influence.
This from Casanova to Freud have testified to the erotic appeal of concealment, but the
veils that conceal are always asking to be pulled away so that somehow we can get at
and see the naked truth.
Thank you very much.
