Helmut Newton’s sexual fantasies may have differed from yours and mine, but he certainly had a singular vision. This 1989 documentary about his work, Frames From The Edge, was directed by Adrian Maben, who was also behind the 1972 concert film Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii.

The opening of Newton’s 2004 New York Times obituary by Suzy Menkes: 

“Helmut Newton, the master photographer of sexual perversity and the founding father of androgynous imagery, died Friday at 83 in a way that he might have scripted in his narrative fashion photographs: from an accident in his Cadillac at Chateau Marmont, the star-studded Hollywood hotel. He was wintering there as usual, with his wife of 55 years, June, known as the photographer Alice Springs.

Newton’s penchant in equal measure for glamour and sexual depravity — women crouching in horse saddles and designer boots or maids provocatively available as in a Jean Genet movie — made him the most powerful and most copied fashion photographer of the 20th century. He refracted through his lens the sexual and feminist revolutions, making his women appear as sex objects, yet in control of their destiny.

Alternately scandalizing and titillating, Newton picked up sobriquets like the ‘king of kink’ and the ’35mm Marquis de Sade.’ Yet his work, like his character and his background, was far more complex than appeared in his best-known glossy images from Vogue in the 1960’s or the Yves Saint Laurent image of a woman loitering in a dark alley in a mannish pantsuit — matched to a naked version taken for the photographer’s personal album.”