Helmut Newton

Technically, I have not changed very much. Ask my assistants. They’ll tell you, I am the easiest photographer to work with. I don’t have heavy equipment. I work out of one bag.

I did find a wonderful girl last year, but the photographs that we did were more about motorcars.

I spend a lot of time preparing. I think a lot about what I want to do. I have prep books, little notebooks in which I write everything down before a sitting. Otherwise I would forget my ideas.

It’s that I don’t like white paper backgrounds. A woman does not live in front of white paper. She lives on the street, in a motor car, in a hotel room.

I like photographing the people I love, the people I admire, the famous, and especially the infamous. My last infamous subject was the extreme right wing French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Well, it takes a certain amount of money. And I’ve got to see pictures of the person ahead of time. If I don’t like the way the person looks I won’t do it.

They often ask me to shoot for them. But I say no. I think an old guy like me ought not take pages away from young photographers who need the exposure.

People gave us everything for free. We were allowed only so much film per picture, but there was no limit to the creativity. I like to say that they let us loose like wild dogs in the streets of Paris.

I was lucky to have my wife as the art director, and it turned out to be quite something – a great success. I’m very proud of it.

In the photographs themselves there’s a definite contrast between the figures and the location – I like that kind of California backyard look; clapboard houses, staircases outdoors.

My job as a portrait photographer is to seduce, amuse and entertain.

The whole series is black-and-white, so when I went to shoot one of the women I only had black-and-white film with me. She had reddish hair and was a very pretty girl, a nice girl.

I have mixed feelings about those sorts of things. When I see it done by interesting young people, I think it’s very valid. But when established photographers, people in their forties, copy me and get a lot of money, well, I find that to be very stupid.

I used to hate doing color. I hated transparency film. The way I did color was by not wanting to know what kind of film was in my camera.