The Fashion of Helmut Newton and Bettina Rheims

Overview

Inundated as we are by eroticised bodies selling the fantasy of sex and danger in magazines every day, the new exhibition The Fashion of Helmut Newton and Bettina Rheims may at first cause some to glaze over. But the work of these two iconic photographers has shaped the conventions of fashion imagery that our eyes read with such casual fluency today.

Fifty black-and-white photographs, dating from the 1970s through 1990s, show each artist's approach to representing gender: Newton's fascination with the allure of powerful women, and Rheims' with the fleeting gender ambiguity of the human body as it blooms into adulthood.

Photographs from the Private Property portfolios of Newton (b.1920-d.2004) conjure an opulent fantasy world of chandeliers and fetish gear. Some images are self-satirising, consciously theatrical and hedonistic, like By-Product of an Advertising Sitting, Paris, where a laughing woman's breast is groped by a man smoking a cigar. Masked Woman by the Sea, Naked and Masked Woman by the Sea, Dressed raises the question of which is the more powerful or objectified state: nude, or corseted in leather? Sigourney Weaver appears in a striking portrait that reminds you why she is famous, while the phallic imagery of Woman with Snake, Berlin is amusingly obvious.

Alexander McQueen said in 2001 that Newton was "preoccupied with role play and crossing the divide between the masculine and feminine"; Newton himself respectfully said, "Women are stronger than men — in every possible way," even as he perhaps exalted to excess the eroticism of women's sexual availability to men.

While Rheims (b.1952-) was Newton's protegee, her photography explores androgyny and shades of power between the sexes through a more naturalistic lens. Rheims launched her career as a portrait photographer at 26, having worked already as a model, journalist, and gallerist. Her acclaimed Modern Lovers (1990) series of low-contrast studio portraits offers a soft, understated counterpoint to the sensual decadence and spicy wit of Newton's glamorous tableaux.

Rheims scouted her models, all under age 20, on the street. A wall of portraits shows slender boys sporting earrings and bee-stung lips, and pubescent girls with strong bone structure and diminutive buds for breasts. A glimpse of the child they all recently were is discernible. Among them is a most disarming portrait of Kate Moss peeking from behind lush, heavy tendrils of hair. It's reminiscent of artist Rona Yefman's photograph of her transgender brother Gil emerging from the sea, looking both assured and vulnerable. How much you read into a face like that is up to you.