On December 2, 2026, the Newton Foundation in Berlin opens a new exhibition: White Women / Sleepless Nights / Big Nudes. First presented in 2012, the works from the three iconic Newton books that give the show its title are now placed in a new context. Newton planned each book meticulously; every volume follows its own logic and scale. Together, the 200-plus photographs comprise a “best of” the 1970s and early 1980s.
Helmut Newton is one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century. His strikingly inventive pictures, most of them shot on assignment for the leading magazines of the day, appeared regularly from the 1950s on. Newton began exhibiting in galleries in 1975; his first book, White Women, followed a year later. Sleepless Nights was published in 1978, and Big Nudes three years after that. Celebrated and controversial alike, these books cemented Newton’s international reputation beyond his magazine work and have become classics within the genre. Newton staged his photographs to be playful, louche, and provocative, often pushing beyond the boundaries of what was then considered morally acceptable.
The Newton Foundation marks the 50th anniversary of White Women with a new exhibition drawn from all three books: White Women, Sleepless Nights, and Big Nudes. Following the format of the 2012 Museum of Fine Arts, Houston presentation on which it is based, the Berlin show features modern exhibition prints made from the original book photographs. Newton never exhibited these early images together during his lifetime. Several are now recognized as defining works; all occupy the space between fashion and the nude.
Several vitrines hold the original book maquettes with their alternative cover designs, alongside small-format work prints and medium-format lifetime prints that most likely served as artwork for the lithographic reproduction. To accompany the exhibition, TASCHEN is republishing White Women as a near facsimile, with minor adjustments to the layout, and for the first time as a trilingual edition. This legendary publication has been out of print for years; its return addresses a gap in Newton’s bibliography. White Women came out in 1976 in several editions and languages, at a time when far fewer photo books were being made. It won the Kodak Photo Book Award shortly after publication and has been reissued several times since. With this volume, Newton achieved a provocative coup. The book opened the way for an eroticized visual language in fashion photography that peaked in 1980 and 1981 with his famous series Big Nudes and Naked and Dressed, both made for various editions of Vogue. Newton had been working toward this unconventional idea since the mid-1970s – fashion as diptychs, the model clothed in one frame and nude in the next – and it surfaces more than once in White Women. One is a variant of his seminal Yves Saint Laurent, Rue Aubriot, shot one night in 1975 on the street it is named for, for French Vogue. Just minutes later, presumably, he made a second version with a nude model. This was where he first put nudity and fashion in the same frame, subtly, in images that read like film stills.
He assembled his second book, Sleepless Nights (1978), with comparable finesse: a different selection of recent work in black and white and color, much of it already published in magazines. Here again the subject is women – their bodies and their clothes. Many of the images are as much portrait or partial nude as fashion shot, and three smaller, now iconic series belong to this group: models in orthopedic braces, made shortly after the publication of J. G. Ballard’s novel Crash; models with Hermès leather saddles, which drew particular controversy; and the so-called “store dummies.” In the mid-1970s, on fashion assignments for French Vogue, Newton began working with shop mannequins – for instance, having one wired in place, late at night, on the Pont Alexandre III bridge over the Seine. Stylists made them up so convincingly that it could take a second or third look to tell whether a figure was a living model or a life-size mannequin. It was an unusual, even radical idea, one Newton had already introduced to fashion photography in the mid-1960s, then still in black and white for British Vogue.
Big Nudes elevated the photographer to world renown – by then in his early 60s. It too stayed in print for decades after 1981, in hundreds of thousands of copies, across several publishers and languages. Karl Lagerfeld contributed a foreword to the German edition. In his autobiography, Newton traced the origin of the Big Nudes to the oversized wanted posters issued by the German police for the Red Army Faction: they gave him the idea of shooting full-body nudes with a medium-format camera in the studio, then printing them life-size. He first showed them at that unusual scale in 1981 at Galerie Daniel Templon in Paris, alongside the first edition of the book – not yet called Big Nudes but simply carrying his name, published by Éditions du Regard, Paris. The first five Big Nudes of 1980, numbered in Roman numerals, have hung in the foundation’s upper lobby since its opening in the summer of 2004. Alongside them hangs the life-size diptych Here They Come from the Naked and Dressed series that ran in French Vogue in the fall of 1981 and, almost simultaneously, in the book Big Nudes. They are among his best-known bodies of work. Both book and exhibition include other black-and-white nudes, shot between 1979 and 1981 in Paris, Monaco, Los Angeles, Saint-Tropez, and Brescia.
To mark the exhibition, the facsimile reissue of White Women will be published by TASCHEN in the fall of 2026, with a text by Philippe Garner.
