Helmut Newton

Some things age gracefully. Others refuse to behave. Fifty years on, Helmut Newton’s first publication, a book that elevated his name far beyond the pages of fashion magazines, returns in a landmark, international re-edition. First published under the titles White Women and Femmes secrètes in 1976, it brought together fashion, portraiture, and the erotic in a visual language that was cool, controlled, and unapologetically provocative.

Here are the women: glamorous, commanding, seductive, and in control. Here are the clothes, cars, hotels, pools, bedrooms, and immaculate interiors. Here are the cultural icons of the time, from Paloma Picasso, Veruschka and Elsa Peretti to Karl Lagerfeld, David Hockney, and Charlotte Rampling. And here’s Newton, orchestrating it all with his famously sharp eye and subversive sense of humor.

This 50th-anniversary edition preserves the source selection and sequence of photographs, alongside Newton’s own reflections and Philippe Garner’s original introduction. Garner, who first met Newton in 1975 and later became Vice-President of the Helmut Newton Foundation, has added an updated text reflecting on the photographer’s life and on how his lens captured his “erotic pictures and portraits mondains.”

Half a century on, Newton’s arresting compositions and appetite for the subversive continue to fascinate. This new, multilingual edition gives a fresh generation of readers, photographers, artists, and fashion lovers the chance to discover what made Femmes secrètes challenging then – and what it still reveals today.

Exhibition:
Newton Foundation, Berlin
Helmut Newton‘s Early Books
From December 2, 2026 to May 16, 2027