The Steely Helmut

Helmut Newton's world isn't fantasy. It exists, locked behind the large double doors of expensive hotel suites, or shuttered behind the long windows of apartments on the Avenue Foch: a world of the rich and, yes, the perverted.

There, Helmut's women creep out of the closet, across the deep-pile carpet, parading their neatly clipped pubic mounds for the fashion photographer, who peers through the camera lens, barking orders in German. These women are cold, determined professionals. They may go off to vomit in toilets, but they return to the bedroom with lips and labia firmly in place.

While perversion has become mainstream in the postmodern world (thanks partly to Himself), Helmut's pictures still have the ability to shock. They are confrontational rather than narrative—silvery mirrors held up to a sick world of beautiful fakes and undead empire rulers. In an age when the safest sex is phone sex, when emotion is programmed and compassion forgotten, there is the Helmut woman: safe in her strongbox penthouse, a replicant sheathed in YSL. "Archives de Nuit," 60 black-and-white pictures selected by Helmut from more than 11,000 images, is on display this month as part of Le Mois de la Photo, Paris's biennial tribute to photography. A definite must-see for the color-coordinated culture-vulture.

RUPERT EVERETT