JG Ballard Meets Helmut Newton

From the Guardian, August 7, 2005. The King of Kinky "Helmut Newton was a photographer who never saw the point of not overstating the obvious: in one infamous shoot, he placed a horse’s saddle on a beauty posing in riding jodhpurs on a bed on all fours; in another the women sported medical corsets and braces as Cronenbergian sexual accessories. ‘I hate good taste,’ he once famously remarked. ‘It’s the worst thing that can happen to a creative person.’ … Revealingly, certain like-minded obsessives saw in it a dark, perverse imagination unbound by either good taste or aesthetic elitism. His photographs were best described by the dystopian novelist JG Ballard, as ‘stills from an elegant and erotic movie, perhaps entitled ‘Midnight at the Villa d’Este’ or ‘Afternoons in Super-Cannes’, a virtual film that has never played at any theatre, but has screened itself inside our heads for the last 40 years’. … Interestingly, Ballard places Newton firmly in the Surrealist tradition of Delvaux or Magritte rather than August Sander or Cartier-Bresson, and certainly his models constantly seem lost, surprised, or entranced, his exotic backdrops oddly incongruous, as if we are suddenly being afforded a glimpse of a bigger narrative whose contours we can only guess at. That narrative, as Ballard points out, takes place first of all inside Newton’s head, and is then passed over to the viewer, who transposes their own version on to it, the process of association as mysterious as the unconscious itself…"