Through a Camera Lens Darkly; Helmut Newton said his photography was not an art. But, oh, how we beg to differ.(Obituary)

Byline: Dana Thomas

Helmut Newton, the provocative German photographer who introduced kink to mainstream fashion, died following a car crash in Hollywood on Friday at 83. Long plagued with cardiac problems--he shot several blunt self-portraits while connected to EKG machines--Newton suffered a heart attack as he drove his Cadillac into a wall at the Chateau Marmont hotel on Sunset Boulevard.

Newton's work was known for its hard-edged eroticism and straightforward point of view. His women were usually clad in towering black patent stilettos, blood red lipstick and not much else. Among his most famous images is a 1973 portrait of actress Charlotte Rampling naked on top of a table, and a 1975 shot of a female model dressed in a razor-sharp Yves Saint Laurent men's suit, hair slicked back, smoking a cigarette on a dark Parisian street. Newton's more extreme pictures--high-heeled women wrapped in bandages and confined to wheelchairs, naked women cinched in children's medical corsets--enraged feminists around the world, who labeled him a cruel misogynist. It was a charge he dismissed as "stupid and simple-minded." "Would I spend my life photographing something I hate?" he told NEWSWEEK in 1998. "I think women become more powerful [in my pictures] because they exude a great sexuality that will surely conquer the male. I think I'm a feminist."

Born in Berlin to a rich Jewish family in 1920, Newton bought his first camera when he was 12. As a teen, he worked with the German photographer Yva, but in 1938 he fled Nazi Germany and eventually settled in Australia, where he took up fashion photography and ...