"I find that one can immediately recognize a photo by Newton." "In my opinion, that's where his genius lies." "Every great photographer's work is distinguishable among thousands of other people's work." "Avedon's or Bourdin's work is also highly distinct." "But for me, Helmut's work is the most easily recognizable when I look through a stack of pictures." "Unless it is a very good copy, which is extremely rare, there are no good imitations of Helmut's work." "Whatever he does is good, because he did it." "Whoever tries to copy him lacks the essence of his work." "A black and white picture by Newton, if I may compare it to something, has the quality of a Matisse drawing." "He doesn't try to take the place of the camera." "When you look at his pictures, especially the ones that aren't staged or portraits, he takes the place of someone who is observing the scene as it happens." "I find that to be very rare in so called sophisticated photography." "One might think that there is an ideal perspective for a face or a body but his angle is always slightly different." "He has the eye of a voyeur being an excellent observer at the same time." "I have an older brother, he is ten years older than I am, and he always wanted to be a farmer." "I always wanted to be a reporter, since I was little, with lots of different cameras dangling around my neck, wearing a Burberry coat with a turned up collar, and a big hat with my Press Pass attached to it." "While other children wanted to become train conductors," "I wanted to be this crazy reporter." "I never really have difficulties in finding the right location to shoot." "I'm like the carrier pigeon, I follow my instinct, and go where I feel it's right." "Some people depict me like a dog following a trail or trying to find the right spot to pee." "He keeps going around in circles, until suddenly he finds the right place to pee, or to photograph, in my case." "And that's how I do it." "This is my Berlin notebook." "I have many of them because I have a very bad memory." "Here, for example, is what's on the first page." "Paris." "Apparently, it's not only Berlin." "Rosemary, no hand." "Telephone number." "This girl, I was told, was very beautiful, but had only one hand." "Fantastic!" "I never saw her." "Here, a hotel in Paris with a wonderful alcove and old iron beds, very pretty." "Too old, though, I 'm not really into these things anymore." "Then, back to Berlin." "The word schlagsahne, whipped cream." "A very important word for me, whipped cream." "Von Stroheim, Von Stroheim, don't know why he is here." "Monaco." "Hey, what's this?" "Oh, and this is very funny." "It is a list with the names of whorehouses in Berlin." "Some journalist gave it to me." "Very important, very practical." "A little lower." "But watch the expression." "Too much hair everywhere." "Stop." "Stay exactly like that." "Black light that we used, for example, in the pictures we made in the past four days, is very typical for Berlin." "It almost looks like a picture treated with acid." "The sunlight doesn't suit Berlin." "When I see the black lakes, the black forests, and those heavy black clouds that hang over the lakes in summer, it fascinates me." "The light is very penetrating." "And there is a lot of it, it isn't dark, it is a very special quality of light." "Swimming pools, like many other things in my work, reflect my memories." "My photos, especially in the past twenty years, are mostly based on memories." "I photographed many women who were excellent swimmers or divers." "It fascinates me, a person, a woman of course, it could also be a man, but for me it has to be a woman, floating through the air like a circus artist hanging from a trapeze." "They flow or they fly, you can only do that over water or on a trapeze." "My parents used to spend all their summer holidays in spas, in big, elegant hotels." "Those days, I guess, that was the fashionable thing to do." "So I spent a lot of time in these huge, beautiful hotels." "They still have a mysterious charm to me." "In a hotel you're a stranger, it's not your home." "You sleep in a bed in which many have slept before you, and every day, week, month, someone else stared at the same walls." "I've always found that to be very exciting, actually somewhat erotic." " You coming to dinner with us ?" " Yes, sure." "Listen, I'm worried about the girl." "A broad with big tits and everything." "Got something for me?" "Oh, sure." "Don't worry, it's all set." " What's your name, please?" " Michaela." "Thank you for coming, it's very nice of you." "How tall are you?" "I am one meter seventy four." "Right." "I'm making landscape photography in Berlin." "I was born and raised here." "I'm very much into that." "The forests, the lakes and so on." "How do you look in a bikini?" "Well, um, it's a little hard to describe." "Do you have big breasts or not?" "I do!" "Are they hot?" "Quite hot." "Good, how are the legs?" "Not bad!" "Well, maybe I'm imagining that there's a Berlin prototype that I'd recognize on the street." "A tall, young girl, great body, and something in the color of her skin." "You know, when their coloring is slightly bluish, so white you can see the veins shine through the skin." "That's probably because the sun doesn't shine very much here." "Beautiful legs, beautiful legs!" "How much do you measure around the chest?" "Ninety." "Could you take your shirt off, please?" "You didn't recognize that picture?" "Which one?" "Oh, yes!" "Of course, I took that picture." "That's funny." "What are you wearing under that?" "A bra." "Would you mind to...?" "You can say no." "If you mind that's too bad." "No, I don't really mind." "Are you sure?" "Yes, but it depends, what are these pictures for?" "It's fashion pictures." "All right, but I don't want to be naked." "Only the torso." "This is for an ad campaign!" "For billboards." "I really can't, I would love to, but I really can't show nudity." "All right, then." "All right?" "So why don't you take that off now?" "No problem, if you don't want to." "I think we should forget about it." "Very good, thank you." "Goodbye, thanks." "I thought that such an icon of photography would be a snob and everything." "But no, he was very friendly." "Last year I was so surprised." "When we were having lunch, he was talking a lot." "It was very interesting to listen to him, there are not many men with such experience." "So I listened to him talking." "He said something funny." "A girl was hanging off a helicopter and he threw pieces of red meat into the sea." "So, there were all these sharks around her, and he, he was shooting pictures." "That makes me think of the picture with the champagne." "You know, the champagne thrown in the face." "Sometimes he does stuff like that." "That's not very nice." "No, but there's not many photographers who would do that." "Girls who want to work with him know that they will have to do that kind of thing." "We are paid for doing this." "Sometimes I have to wear shoe size 38, when my real size is 42, and I have to run down the street wearing a 38." "That's even worse!" "Because it really hurts." "There is a pretty girl with a denim jacket." "Would you describe yourself more as a photographer or an artist?" "I repeat what I always say and what I said yesterday," ""There are two dirty words in photography." "One is art, and the other is good taste."" "Are your works for sale?" "And if yes, for how much?" "Not through museums." "Museums are not the kind of institutions that sell photographs." "Of course they are for sale." "For me, everything is for sale." "It's just a question of the price !" "But..." "I do this for a living." "I work because I love it and because I love to make money." "Could you tell us an approximate price?" "A picture that is thirty by forty centimeters is about $1,000, approximately, but I 'm not quite sure." "$1,000?" "Yes, but many imitations are circulating, well, you know." "I mean copies." "Ladies and gentlemen," "Helmut Newton is one of the leading and most popular fashion photographers of our times." "His work goes beyond fashion photography." "He very much influenced, without any doubt, the image of the world as we know it today..." "It's very tough." "Forgive me, it's not always easy." "You know, when you make a picture with Helmut, you become a Newton, that's the secret." "You become a graphic object, and that's why I always come back to this comparison to a Matisse drawing." "He looks for a certain shape, and I believe you can only work with him if you accept that." "Personally, when I make pictures with a great photographer," "I 'd like the picture to be typical for the photographer." "I don't care what it looks like, good, cute, not cute, ugly, flat, tired, that's not what I focus on." "I focus on the personality of the photographer behind that picture." "You know, often fashion photographers have the complex of wanting to be great portrait photographers." "They want to be great but in different ways." "For me, it all goes together." "Even Helmut's portraits reflect the fashion of the time which reflects the spirit of the time as well." "That's why, for me, Helmut is a great photographer." "I won't try to fit him into a category, that would be silly." "I can't stand photographers who come with huge staffs and a ton of assistants." "He usually comes alone or with one assistant, and a small camera or two, and everything happens in a few seconds." "That makes it even more difficult to take pictures with others for ten hours and have a mediocre out come." "I 'm thinking of Madame Curie." "She did her thing in her own kitchen before working in real laboratories." "With Helmut, it's a little bit like that." "It's so, maybe not homemade, but physical, his way of working." "I think that the spontaneity of his images which at the same time seem so composed and sophisticated, makes his work so different from other photographers." "I recognize his style before I even recognize the picture." "It has something violent, always a little shocking, and at the same time, baroque." "For me, it's something very evident and very secretive at the same time." "There's one that I like particularly," "I can't even really tell you why." "There is the picture, there is me in it, and in the background there's another Newton photo, so there is a picture in a picture that's like the mirror in the mirror." "I love that the picture is complicated." "He took it at my place." "I think he's the only photographer that I would have ever let come into my house because I think the intimacy of someone's home is something very important." "He has the right to do that." "Yes, that's from the same shooting." "Oh, yes!" "That's a picture that we stole." "When I say we stole it," "I mean that it was done at the last minute and it was done very quickly." "It was for the New York Times Magazine, for Yves Saint Laurent's latest collection." "This one he made very quickly in my car." "One has to know me well to be able to take a picture like this in twenty minutes." "I love the aspect of skin, clothes and at the same time this deep black that conceals what needs to be concealed." "In Newton's pictures , the black is always where it's supposed to be." "We always look for an answer in a picture." "We hope that something in the picture will give us an answer to something or answer the question you asked ." "And Helmut's photos always expose something but remain mysterious at the same time." "You always want to know more, but they answer your question in part." "That's why women love them so much." "All our friends ask us what we do all day in Monte Carlo." "We both answer that the day is never long enough." "I get up at eight o'clock, have breakfast on the terrace in the summer, that is." "Then I read my mail and make calls." "At noon we go down to the hotel beach to swim, have lunch there, and stay at the beach until four o'clock." "I love the light here." "I'm not very comfortable with photographing in artificial light." "On the contrary, I love to shoot in daylight." "Here, I have the most wonderful light." "I can use the ocean as a background but there's so many different backgrounds here." "I have a choice." "I am now 67 years old." "You know, I cannot live in a big city anymore, not in New York, or in Paris." "That's why I go back and forth between Monte Carlo and Los Angeles." "Hollywood is just like here, only a little bigger." "The palm trees in Hollywood are taller, and there's more people, but otherwise the spirit is very much the same." "Open the windows." "The smell in here makes me sick." "Open the windows, the smell in here makes me sick." "I don't like to carry too many cameras on me." "I'm not, as they say, a professional who loves hardware." "The less I carry, the better it is for me." "It's all in here, in the head, in the eye." "The lenses I use are usually normal lenses, in 85 - 90 percent of the cases." "I work faster and more efficiently like that." "I'm a professional voyeur." "But I'm not really interested in the people that I photograph." "The girls, their private lives, their character, have no importance for me." "I am interested in what is on the outside, what I see, what my camera sees." "People often tell me, "You don't photograph the soul."" "I say, "What does that mean?"" "I photograph a body, a face." "I am interested in the face, breasts, the legs, and you can see that in my pictures." "And you can also see, I hope, a little more." "But the soul, that I don't understand."