This not only enhanced the notion of the photographer/voyeur, but necessarily rendered all viewers fellow-accomplices in the implicitly sadomasochistic sexual fantasy. Later on, she would coach his models to pose for him in roles that played on the whimsical cruelties of a dominatrix. Not only did she dress up and model extensively in a series of storytelling tableaux vivants, but she lent her lighting and scene-setting skills to the preparation of a number of his images. Her influence seems to have been considerable: the notion of a model as actress is hardly a new one, but Browne's collaboration with Newton, on both sides of the camera, was substantial. From 1940 to 1945 he served in the Australian Army, and after settling in Sydney, he met and, in 1948, married the photographer and actress June F Browne, also known as June Brunell, and, more improbably, as Alice Springs. The situation in Berlin became increasingly more dangerous for Jews, and in 1938 he left for Singapore, and then Australia. Newton bought his first camera in 1932, and by the age of 17 had apprenticed himself to the theatrical photographer Yva (Else Simon). Yet her androgynously sensual presence pervaded his obsessive fascination with strikingly tall models wearing the glossily lacquered hairstyles and the seamed stockings of the 1940s. The meeting was not a success - she took umbrage at a light-hearted comment - and the portrait was never taken. In love with Marlene Dietrich, so he said, from the time he attended the American School, where he went at the age of 12, he met her years later when they were both in New York and he was to take her portrait. I controlled the situation, I wasn’t the deer, I was equal to the hunter, I could decide what I wanted to do.” Nadja Auermann, the subject of some of Newton’s most triggering images, including one in which she describes herself looking like a discarded doll, opines: “We can say that this is sexist or misogynistic, but we can also say that he holds up a mirror to society: and basically shows you want your wife to run around in a short skirt and basically treat her like a Barbie.He was born Helmut Neustädter, into a middle-class family in Weimar republic Berlin, where decadence and smoky nostalgia were the order of every film, poster, song or cabaret of the day. And Helmut Newton’s photos made me stronger.

“When you are 20 years old, 1.80 meters tall with blond hair, you feel like a hunted deer. In contrast, model Sylvia Gobbel says she felt transformed when posing for the photographer. “I am fundamentally against restricting the freedom of art,” von Boehm says, nonetheless, he includes archival footage of Susan Sontag accusing Newton of being a misogynist. The photographer was unapologetically politically incorrect, a characteristic that is celebrated by the director. Indeed, power is one of Newton’s main subjects, and it’s what makes his work so controversial, never more so than now in this moment of cancel culture.

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