It's no surprise that Helmut Newton shot stylishly soft-core "pictorials" for Playboy
for nearly 30 years. After all, Newton's fashion photography was famous for its dark eroticism, its suggestion of dominance and submission amid the silk and heels of Vogue
and Elle
. But it is surprising to realize that most of the 160 images collected in this volume fall substantially short of Newton's best work. Though Hefner's foreword rightly observes that Newton "used his fashion photographer's eye to make the erotic almost surrealistic" and that his centerfolds were "curiously unsettling," a great erotic shot requires not only artistic skill and vision, but also a suitable model. And Newton's fetishistic vision didn't always mix well with the demeanor of the typical Playmate. As Abish notes in his excellent introduction, "the unfeeling female of [Newton's] imagination is a familiar icon of the Berlin cabaret." She descends from Marlene Dietrich, not Marilyn Monroe. In the series where Newton got the right models for his vision—Kristine De Bell in "200 Motels," Nastassja Kinski in "Kinski Exposed," Uschi Obermaier in "Bed and Board"—the results are hot and haunting. In ones where he didn't, the results may be unusually stylish for Playboy
, but they aren't much compared to Newton's better work—a distinction that will hardly keep most Playboy
fans from wearing out the pages of this book. (Nov.)
