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Frames From the Edge follows legendary Australian photographer Helmut Newton from one photo shoot to another as he travels between LA, Paris, Berlin and more!

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Helmut Newton - Images That Changed Fashion
Frames From the Edge follows legendary Australian photographer Helmut Newton from one photo shoot to another as he travels between LA, Paris, Berlin and more!

Filmed while Newton was in his 60s, the film is now, 20 years later, less a documentary about its ostensible subject, Mr. Newton, and more a homage to the decade in which he reached his zenith.

From the imagery, to the soundtrack, to the various Hollywood and fashion industry celebrities interviewed, Frames From the Edge exudes the unique brand of broke-down, not-quite-so-modern modernism that the '80s are now infamous for.

By almost any definition Helmut Newton was one of the most successful photographers of all time, many would argue the most successful. Certainly, Frames From the Edge makes that claim.

More recent evidence is that in December of 2008, four years after his death, a print of his most famous work “Sie Kommen, Paris, 1981” sold for $662,500 at Christie’s. Additionally, as of this writing the re-release of SUMO, his authoritative book of prints, remains #1 on the photography bestseller list on Amazon.

To say that the film doesn’t succeed in offering insight into the inner life of its subject would be incorrect.

However, like the recent documentary The September Issue, which follows Vogue editor Anna Wintour and her staff as they prepare the yearly benchmark of high fashion, we learn more from what’s not said than what the subject chooses to enunciate for posterity.

Perhaps nothing says more than a question not asked in films like The September Issue and Frames From the Edge, films that require the permission and collusion of their subjects to be made.

Much of the value of this film is in the depictions of an artist at work.

Frames From the Edge opens on a Newton photo shoot already in progress. There’s a roasted suckling pig turning on a spit in front of a pure white background.

A model stands next to it in high-heeled boots.

So high are the heels that she can’t walk normally and is forced to tip toe awkwardly around the stage.

As the model staggers and almost falls we begin to see how Helmut Newton exploited the reality that a photograph implies by staging scenes at once so impossible, poignant and sexually charged that our critical minds are short-circuited.

It is an enchantment that only art at its best can produce.

Newton says later in the film, “It’s not like a movie. A photograph is an instant that is so limited. There is no continuity to it. Possibly the beauty of a photograph is that there is a mystery about it, that you’re just dealing with that one moment.”

The clicking of Newton’s Hasselblad transitions us out of the photo shoot into a pan of the Los Angeles skyline looking out from his suite at the Chateau Marmont.

Underneath this long camera move, with the skyline barely visible under cascades of smog, Helmut can be heard saying, “I’ve been coming here off and on for seventeen years, from December to March.

I love Los Angeles, I love Hollywood, I’m not that crazy about San Francisco which pretends to be very European and cultured and all that and I don’t give very much of a shit about culture.”

By culture Newton means the affectations and interests of the rich, the bourgeois, the idle class, the modern aristocracy.

At one point his wife, June (a one-time actress and well-known photographer under the pseudonym Alice Springs), points out that, “I think Helmut is very bourgeois.

He’d say it himself. In his milieu he loves photographing the bourgeois but in that bourgeois there are undercurrents; they are not boring people. He loves the idea of these ‘idle ladies’ as he calls them that have nothing to do and are just waiting to have something to do.”

Helmut Newton In Australia:

Born in Germany. Newton was interned by British authorities while in Singapore and was sent to Australia on board the Queen Mary, arriving in Sydney on 27 September 1940.

He was released from internment in 1942

In 1948, he married Australian actress June Browne, who performed under the stage name June Brunell.

She later became a successful photographer using the ironic pseudonym Alice Springs (after Alice Springs, the central Australian town).

In 1946, Newton set up a studio in fashionable Flinders Lane in Melbourne and worked on fashion, theatre and industrial photography in the affluent postwar years.

He shared his first joint exhibition in May 1953 with Wolfgang Sievers, a German refugee like himself.

The exhibition 'New Visions in Photography' was held at the Federal Hotel in Collins Street Melbourne, and was probably the first glimpse of New Objectivity photography in Australia. 

Newton went into partnership with Henry Talbot, a fellow German who had also been interned at Tatura, and his association with Talbot continued even after 1957, when he left Australia for London.

Newton's growing reputation as a fashion photographer was rewarded when he secured a commission to illustrate fashions in a special Australian supplement for Vogue magazine, published in January 1956.

He won a 12-month contract with British Vogue and left for London in February 1957.

Newton left the magazine before the end of his contract and went to Paris, where he worked for French and German magazines. He returned to Melbourne in March 1959 on a a contract for Australian Vogue before embarking on an internation photographic career.

Helmut Newton died in 2004 of a heart attack while driving his Rolls Royce down the driveway at his beloved Chateau Marmont in Hollywood. 


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