Helmut Newton, the monogamous photographer who loved telling women to get naked

Carlos Amato went to the definitive retrospective exhibition of the great man’s work in Amsterdam, and met one of his sexiest models

'Helmut liked women who were macho," said Sylvia Gobbel. "Not only physically macho, but mentally macho."

We were at Amsterdam's FOAM gallery, looking at an image by the late, great German fashion photographer Helmut Newton, taken in 1981.

Gobbel was the subject: she was 19 at the time and as naked as the day is long, with a physique of such voluptuous athleticism it would have given an Amazon a complex.

"He once stopped working with another model who was absolutely beautiful, after just one shoot. I asked him why. He said she's a nice girl. I said, 'But that's a compliment! He said 'No. I don't work with nice girls.' She wasn't strong enough."

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Today Gobbel is even stronger than she was in 1981. An Austrian turned Parisian, she stands six feet in her tights and tells ribald jokes with the steel-plated drawl of a Bond villainess.

She was a guest of honour last month at FOAM's Newton retrospective, sponsored by Wolford, the Austrian lingerie brand he worked with.

Throughout the 1970s and '80s, Newton's pictures steered fashion photography into gloriously dubious territory.

He dabbled wittily in fetishism, sadomasochism, voyeurism and icy Weimar-style androgyny - but far from demeaning his subjects, his images liberated them from the pandemic of docile blankness that plagued fashion aesthetics (and often still does).

In a Newton picture, the subject emits so much unapologetic erotic authority you almost feel the need to ask for permission to look.

Gobbel loomed large in one of his most celebrated frames - Self-Portrait with Wife and Models - in which he used a Vogue Homme editorial commission for a trenchcoat brand as the pretext for an elaborate visual joke about paparazzos, flashers, and the politics of looking.

Newton shot himself, in the mirror, in the moment of photographing Gobbel, who is clad only in a pair of stiletto heels.

"Those were fetishist shoes from Picard in Pigalle," recalled Gobbel. "In those days nobody wore those shoes except prostitutes or transvestites. Thanks to God, I have very big feet, like a man. And these shoes were made for me."

Another model's legs invade the left of the mirrored image, and seated to the right of the mirror is the magnificently bored figure of June Newton, née Brown - Helmut's wife, an Australian actress turned photographer.

June had popped by at the studio (in Vogue's Paris bureau) and was waiting for the shoot to finish; she and Helmut had a social engagement later. She had no idea she was part of the scene.

"Later she saw the shot," said Gobbel, "and said, my God, I'm in the picture! She loved it."

The image fires up an intricate circuit of gazes: we're watching June watching Helmut shooting Gobbel watching June, while Helmut is watching the whole shebang. The second model's legs are just minding their own business.

At last she stopped smiling, and I clicked the shutter ... she looked like a shark, her head was straight on her shoulders, and she was unsmiling

Helmut and June were almost one person, said Gobbel. She recalled the first time Helmut photographed her. "It was at Helmut's apartment. It was just him and me in the studio, but June was upstairs in the bedroom looking down, and she was topless. I was fascinated by this. I was 19, and alone in a photographer's home, naked. So you do think, what's going to happen?

"But June was a very smart woman. She must have thought, to make Sylvia feel comfortable, I'm going to take my top off. When I told people about it, they said: 'Are you sure they didn't have any plans?' And I said 'Plans? What plans?' I was innocent. I've changed since then.

But they were so close, and so perfect. For Helmut, there was only one woman: June. She was his muse, his mother. I once asked him, why don't you have children? He said: 'I'm her son, I'm her husband, I'm her lover.'"

Newton brooked no interference when he took on advertising jobs. "For a lot of these advertising shoots, there was an art director. He would just tell them: 'Go and sit over there. I am the art director. Nobody tells me what to do.' And that was why he was so brilliant.

"Sometimes I would get booked for a shoot with another photographer and the art director would show me a Helmut Newton image of me, and say, 'Sylvia, we want to do something like this.' I would just say 'OK, but did you book Helmut Newton?'"

And when he shot celebrity portraits, he transfigured his subjects into enigmatic earthly deities.

Even Margaret Thatcher aroused his libidinous gaze. "I had wanted to get her in front of my camera for years," he once wrote. "The more powerful she became, the sexier she was for me.

"I put my little old Fuji camera on my tripod, she cocked her head and smiled kind of sourly at my lens. I asked her to straighten her head and please be serious.

"She replied, 'Oh, but one looks so disagreeable when one does not smile.' At last she stopped smiling, and I clicked the shutter ... she looked like a shark, her head was straight on her shoulders, and she was unsmiling."

Carlos Amato attended the Newton retrospective at FOAM Amsterdam as a guest of Wolford