Helmut Newton Quotes

#1. I was lucky to have my wife as the art director, and it turned out to be quite something - a great success. I'm very proud of it.

Helmut Newton

#2. There are two dirty words in photography, one is art, the other is good taste

Helmut Newton

#3. It began when I was so ill that there was a good chance of dying. I promised myself that if I survived I would never again pander to a magazine's requests or follow the ideas of art directors. I would only make images which were personal, which arose out of my own life.

Helmut Newton

#4. It's quite true that what I am aiming at, even when I take portraits, is to get a scandalous picture. I would love to be a paparazzo.

Helmut Newton

#5. My women are always victorious.

Helmut Newton

#6. I hate good taste. It's the worst thing that can happen to a creative person.

Helmut Newton

#7. The desire to discover, the desire to move, to capture the flavor, three concepts that describe the art of photography.

Helmut Newton

#8. There must be a certain look of availability in the women I photograph. I think the woman who gives the appearance of being available is sexually much more exciting than a woman who's completely distant. This sense of availability I find erotic.

Helmut Newton

#9. Well, it takes a certain amount of money. And I've got to see pictures of the person ahead of time. If I don't like the way the person looks I won't do it.

Helmut Newton

#10. The first 10 000 shots are the worst.

Helmut Newton

#11. What I try to do is a good bad picture. I work it out very carefully, and then I do something that looks as if it went wrong.

Helmut Newton

#12. The point of my photography has always been to challenge myself, to go a little further than my Germanic discipline and Teutonic nature would traditionally permit me to.

Helmut Newton

#13. My job as a portrait photographer is to seduce, amuse and entertain.

Helmut Newton

#14. I am very attracted by bad taste-it is a lot more exciting than that supposed good taste which is nothing more than a standardized way of looking at things,

Helmut Newton

#15. They often ask me to shoot for them. But I say no. I think an old guy like me ought not take pages away from young photographers who need the exposure.

Helmut Newton

#16. The whole series is black-and-white, so when I went to shoot one of the women I only had black-and-white film with me. She had reddish hair and was a very pretty girl, a nice girl.

Helmut Newton

#17. The photographs don't arouse me. All I can think about is the hard work it took to make them.

Helmut Newton

#18. People gave us everything for free. We were allowed only so much film per picture, but there was no limit to the creativity. I like to say that they let us loose like wild dogs in the streets of Paris.

Helmut Newton

#19. Photography is 10% inspiration and 90% moving furniture.

Helmut Newton

#20. Technically, I have not changed very much. Ask my assistants. They'll tell you, I am the easiest photographer to work with. I don't have heavy equipment. I work out of one bag.

Helmut Newton

#21. I did find a wonderful girl last year, but the photographs that we did were more about motorcars.

Helmut Newton

#22. It's that I don't like white paper backgrounds. A woman does not live in front of white paper. She lives on the street, in a motor car, in a hotel room.

Helmut Newton

#23. The term "political correctness" has always appalled me, reminding me of Orwell's "Thought Police" and fascist regimes.

Helmut Newton

#24. I like photographing the people I love, the people I admire, the famous, and especially the infamous. My last infamous subject was the extreme right wing French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Helmut Newton

#25. You should feel that, under the right conditions, all women would be available.

Helmut Newton

#26. I used to hate doing color. I hated transparency film. The way I did color was by not wanting to know what kind of film was in my camera.

Helmut Newton

#27. I spend a lot of time preparing. I think a lot about what I want to do. I have prep books, little notebooks in which I write everything down before a sitting. Otherwise I would forget my ideas.

Helmut Newton

#28. Genius and taste don't go together.

Helmut Newton

#29. Look, I'm not an intellectual - I just take pictures.

Helmut Newton

#30. What I find interesting is working in a society with certain taboos and fashion photography is about that kind of society. To have taboos, then to get around them that is interesting.

Helmut Newton

#31. In the photographs themselves there's a definite contrast between the figures and the location - I like that kind of California backyard look; clapboard houses, staircases outdoors.

Helmut Newton

#32. I have mixed feelings about those sorts of things. When I see it done by interesting young people, I think it's very valid. But when established photographers, people in their forties, copy me and get a lot of money, well, I find that to be very stupid.

Helmut Newton

#33. In my vocabulary there are two bad words: art and good taste.

Helmut Newton

#34. Some people's photography is an art. Not mine. Art is a dirty word in photography. All this fine art crap is killing it already.

Helmut Newton