Editor’s Note: In Snap, we look at the power of a single photograph, chronicling stories about how both modern and historical images have been made.
CNN
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The first time Cindy Crawford worked with the provocative fashion photographer Helmut Newton, the supermodel shed her all-American persona for a dalliance with Monte Carlo for US Vogue. The swimwear shoot, published in the November 1991 issue, famously featured Crawford in a dark one-piece and heels standing on a public monument in the luxe Monégasque district, as well as erotically laying on stage in front of three blindfolded musicians.
But a lesser-seen Polaroid image of the shoot will soon go on view, part of a wider showing of Polaroids by the late German-Australian photographer and his peers. The outtake of Crawford shows her in a black swimsuit and trench coat cinched with a wide gold belt, descending the stairs in front of a grand opera house — one of many times she did so in front of an audience of passersby, out of frame. It’s a more casual, preliminary image for a scene that ultimately didn’t make the cut in Vogue, providing an alternate view of a formative collaboration at the height of the supermodel phenomenon.
“It was more or less used by (Newton) as a sketch,” Matthias Harder, director and curator of the Helmut Newton Foundation, told CNN. The foundation organized the show, “Polaroids,” running as part of the biennial European Month of Photography festival in Berlin, until July 27.
“Especially in the ’90s, he was using a lot of Polaroids to prepare the shoot, control the composition and the lighting, and so on,” Harder added. The one-of-a-kind images have since become a set of works all on their own, featuring in both exhibitions and books, including a monograph by the photographer, titled “Pola Woman,” in 1992, and a second anthology by Taschen in 2011.
Newton was known for bringing sexuality to the fore of his images, from his noir, nude studies of women in his studio space, hotel rooms and cars to his infamous fetish portrait of a model wearing a horse saddle on a bed.
“I loved working with Helmut… He had a sense of humor about his photographs, even some of the more sexualized ones,” Crawford said in a 2021 video for Vogue.
Reflecting on Monte Carlo, she said: “I would always say, ‘Helmut, I’m never putting a saddle on, don’t even ask me.’”
At that time, Crawford was the host of the MTV show “House of Style,” and she took along the crew to film her shoot with Newton.
“Coming to work with Helmut, I mean, I wanted to do Helmut Newton photographs. I didn’t want him to photograph me looking like the Madonna — not Madonna, the Madonna — because he’s one of the few people who can get away with it and it doesn’t look raunchy,” Crawford said in a clip from the show.
Newton continuously concocted stories around the scene as he was making the picture, she told Vogue. For one image from the shoot in Monte Carlo, she played the role of a wealthy widow in a black veil who had taken a new young lover. Meanwhile, the titillating image of her on stage with blindfolded musicians referenced “when elegant people used to have private elegant orgies,” Newton said in the “House of Style” clip.
Newton relocated to Monte Carlo in the 1980s with his wife, June (though they would return to Los Angeles during the winter months), and the luxurious district of the tiny 0.8-square-mile microstate, Monaco, became the backdrop of many of his shoots.
For Newton’s first project with Crawford, the model posed and walked the streets in glamorous bathing suits with an unofficial audience of tourists, construction workers, and the like looking on (they subsequently appeared in the photos, too).
“This is probably the clue to all of his pictures,” said Harder of Newton’s work. “He changes everything into his stage.”
In video clips taken by June, which appear in her short film from 1995, “Helmut Newton by June,” she captures a moment where the invisible fourth wall is broken. As Crawford descends the stairs of the Opéra Garnier Monte-Carlo, Newton is sitting on the ground, Polaroids spread out before him (possibly including the one featured here), and two men ask to pay for snapshots with Crawford. After Newton asks how much cash they have, she and the photographer oblige them, with Crawford striking seductive poses before they are sent off with their priceless keepsakes.
“A Helmut Newton photograph for 1,000 francs?” Crawford said in the “House of Style” clip. “These guys are making a good bargain.”
