After his death last January 23 in a car crash outside the Chateau Marmont hotel in Los Angeles, where he wintered each year, Helmut Newton was eulogized in newspapers and magazines around the world as one of photography's modern greats, as well as an agent of social corruption. People magazine called his pictures "elegantly perverse." Germany's Stern magazine asked whether he was a "decadent voyeur or master fashion photographer?" Nearly every obituary described him as a "provocateur." In the end, he was photography's ultimate, long-lasting sensation, who, to his own seeming amazement and obvious delight-awoke one morning to find that he had redrawn the boundaries of not only photography and art but also culture with his magazine work and classic books such as White Women (1976), Big Nudes (1982), World Without Men(1984), Pola Woman (1992), and Portraits (1998). The fetishes and fantasies he captured with his cameras have become a kind of default definition of edgy chic that today enlivens the imagery of everything from MTV to Super Bowl pregame shows. A German Jew forced to flee the Nazis in 1938, Newton carried memories of Weimar Berlin's artistic avant-garde, as well as the repression of personal freedoms that followed. He mined these memories in his fashion images, never failing to thumb his nose at censorship.
On the following pages, American Photo presents an exclusive tribute to Newton and his most important work, chosen for us by the one person who knew the man and his imagery better than anyone else: his wife and collaborator, June Newton. June, who photographed under the pseudonym Alice Springs, edited Newton's books and curated his exhibitions. For this portfolio, she selected many of Newton's most iconic images—the photos, she says, that he will be remembered by.