Sex

Sayonara mr. Newton

Jan 20, 2024

Link a la versión en Español

Dear Helmut,

Time has come for me to say goodbye. I don’t love you anymore.

Considering you are dead, you probably won't care, nor would you if you were still alive. For me though, this came as a shock, especially after so many years of admiration. Either way, you’ve had plenty of dislike and adoration by women, and have been worshipped by photographers for a big chunk of your career, so I guess you've had enough of other people’s emotions. Nevermind, the thing is, the spark is gone for me and I realise now that what used to feel like a shared knowing was actually just a one sided emotion, so please don't fight this, I must set both you and myself free. But maybe you’re curious about what made me have such a change of heart, I'll try to explain.

I realised I had stopped loving you quite unexpectedly. I spent the New Year holidays in my dad’s hometown, A Coruña, a city in North West Spain where Inditex has its HQ and where Marta Ortega (Amancio Ortega’s daughter and current chair of Inditex) has put together The MOP Foundation, an exhibition centre which is currently holding a retrospective of your work. Oh, Helmut, you should have seen the place! It is a huge space, designed to show photography in all its glory. There is also a repurposed concrete factory which doubles as a coffee shop and gallery, where the silos complete the exhibition with some of your most memorable polaroids.

But coming back to my falling out of love, I should have suspected something was wrong that day, when the morning started rainy and grey, not that I believe in omens, but that one was inescapable, something was off. But I digress, the space is located in the city’s port, it has an artistic shallow pool under a construction that resembles a modern temple, with two walls separated by a staircase. The pool should have been glistening to create an impression of a mirror under the white walls, but in the grey light it looked washed out, sad and somewhat musty. Right upon entrance the space is dark, and there is a massive room where different examples of your work and interviews to curators, models and muses are projected on the four walls. The interviews offer some insights and interesting information and add a sense of intimacy to what we’re about to see: some of the pivotal moments of your career and life are discussed, the fruitful collaboration with June, your wife, and how much your work exploded when you left Sydney and came to Paris. Then, we passed on to a room where lots of tearsheets of your work are put together to compose a collage, there was also some memorabilia on display, including a few barbies that I didn’t quite understand and to be honest haven’t researched on, but I guess they make sense within you work, because now that I think of it, the women in your pictures are in a way like them... Anyway, after that, off I went into a series of dark galleries where some of your biggest known photographs were shown in a truly gorgeous way, many illuminated from the back, like your super famous nudes, which were displayed in a huge format of at least 2,5 metres high.

Don’t get me wrong, I do appreciate how luscious, sexy, and powerful your work was, but you know, quite a lot of time has passed… My expectation that day was to thoroughly enjoy the exhibition, and while I loved the curators' work and how it had been put together, the darkness in the rooms designed to push the atmosphere… regarding your images I’m sorry to say I didn't feel anything [remotely similar to what I used to feel]. Which is a lot, because I’ve loved your work ever since I was a very young fashion student. I know, I know, everything has a time and a place and things done in the past can’t be judged solely with the eyes of today. But after so many years loving you, I was surprised to find how very little was left between us. When I first encountered your photographs more than 20 years ago, they felt sexy, empowering, resolute, funny and supremely powerful. I loved that you put women in positions in which they were simply not seen before, not even imagined by most of society, I loved the sense of humour and irony of them. Now it pains me to say that I saw something else I hadn't noticed before: Male Gaze. There was nothing as powerful as I remembered from the women’s perspective other than in your images they are as sexual and free as you wanted them to be, much as I tried I didn’t see their desire, I saw yours. Which is totally fine, but I loved you because, call me naive, I felt there was something between us, an understanding, a rebelliousness, I don’t know, something that bound us together and that made me feel seen. Now I realise it was just you all along. I guess I was so shocked by the freedom that your images prortrayed at that time that I didn’t notice, how little of that freedom was for anyone else other than you and the story of you, so much as the photographs depict women, it is you who I see and it’s kind of stale now. For some reason, the image of your work I had in my mind was quite the opposite, in it, it was the women who were usually dressed or naked, but holding a space of power against men, I reimagined your work as a reversal of roles, not as the fabulations of a peeping tom. So there, we only see what we want to see.

I’ll give you an example, Grace Jones looking at us from under a towering Dolf Lundgren. Let's imagine for a moment that we’ve never heard of her, or him or the gorgeous couple they made; her super strong and fierce, him so young and slightly shy. Actually, not many Gen Zers have, I can guarantee you that, I teach at fashion university and trust me, they wouldn’t know either of them, when they first arrive they don’t even know you. But anyway, let’s imagine I show them this picture in class and ask them to tell me what they see. Do you think they’re going to see one of the most powerfully beautiful, mysterious and edgy artists of the 70s and 80s against a her young towering action movies actor boyfriend? Will Jean Paul Goude’s goddess come to mind? Do you think they’ll fathom that you might maybe have been imagining a different facet of her, vulnerable and petite against a swedish gigantic man? No, they’re going to see a little woman looking back at the camera with a scared expression. And let me tell you, it was when I saw that picture that I finally got mad at you. Did it bother you how f*cking fierce she was and had to put her back in her place? I know that wasn’t the case, but that’s what this picture kind of says, and that’s the shot you chose. You had a choice. With many of your pictures, even if they’re not my thing anymore I can give you a pass, a naked woman swallowed by a crocodile, the fighting girls in the beach, or the hose directed at a painted woman’s back body: they are fun, they are masterful storytelling and photography, even the girl whose bangs have just been cut and the trimmings are scattered all over her breasts and face, it's a poetic and intimate picture, but why making the most interesting and strong women look like little things or sex dolls? I allowed your work to become one of my references, not just me, a big chunk of the fashion imagery created during the decade of the aughts and 2010’s was modelled around yours. And we already know what some people thought that gave them leeway to do. But more than anything, I’ve shot so many of them, I’ve taken so many images of models following your path and ideas, I’ve made some many women dolls. I now realise you were not playing in my team, and I wish I’d shot more following Ellen von Unwerth’s.

So yes, much as I loved our time together, I can’t keep you in that special place. Of course, your work does deserve credit for at the time, showing the world how mysterious and mesmerising the female energy can be, how sexy the look of her desire is, how powerful as a creature Woman is. I will always love you for unleashing that image in women’s minds. Since no one had done it so well before, you’ll always have a place in my heart. I do love the colour palettes in your colour photography, and although murkier in my mind now than when I first encountered your mannequin series, I regard them fondly, but my love for you is gone. We can still be friends, though.

Diary of a Fashion Misfit

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