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The best of helmut newton6/1/2023 When western horizons open up, the space looks desolate, not grandly primordial like Salgado’s Amazon. If the sun shines, it glints from junked liquor bottles, and the music that accompanies Black’s halting progress is made by the squeaking of plastic seats in a Greyhound bus. The palette is stark, inky black and icy white, with flights of baleful Hitchcockian birds blotting out a washed-out or ashen sky. Matt Black’s American Geography: A Reckoning With a Dream (Thames & Hudson) is a tragic atlas, documenting long months on the road in impoverished tracts of the country. In Newton’s perverse tableaux, beauty is an act of violence, an armed assault on nature. Models were stripped nude after the catwalk parade ended, then ordered to reassume their strutting poses: is their bare skin also a disguise? Jerry Hall squeezes a slab of bleeding beef against her face, and another model shows off the Bvlgari jewels on her wrists and fingers while chopping up an uncooked chicken. Newton, who enjoyed reducing his sophisticated female subjects to a primitive state, saw clothes as fetish wear that revealed the body rather than covering it. Ejected from Eden, their latter-day descendants perform eroticised war dances in Helmut Newton’s Legacy (Taschen). Salgado depicts the indigenous Amazonians as noble savages, innocent but startlingly elegant with their feathered headdresses and patterned face paint.
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