Politics & Power Quote by Helmut Newton

Newton’s seduction is in the casual way he lists his subjects like a social register: love, admiration, fame, infamy. It sounds almost polite, until the last category lands. “Especially the infamous” isn’t a confession of morbid curiosity so much as a statement of method. Newton understood photography as a kind of power exchange: the camera doesn’t just record status, it tests it, flatters it, corners it.

The line also smuggles in a sharp equivalence. “The people I love” and “Jean-Marie Le Pen” occupy the same grammatical space, which is the point. Newton isn’t pretending photography is a moral tribunal; he’s admitting it’s an arena. To photograph someone is to grant them attention, maybe even glamour, and Newton knows that’s dangerous when the subject trades in resentment and authoritarian nostalgia. The choice of Le Pen is a provocation: a reminder that images help build public mythologies, including the ugliest ones.

Context matters here. Newton, a German-Jewish photographer who fled Nazism, built a career on staging desire, dominance, and social performance. His fashion work made wealth look predatory; his portraits often turned celebrity into a kind of specimen. Bringing an “extreme right wing” politician into that frame reads less like endorsement than like confrontation by aesthetic means: put the monster under studio lights, see what the mask is made of.

The subtext is the most Newtonian part: infamy is photogenic because it already understands spectacle. The camera doesn’t create that hunger; it exposes how eagerly it poses.