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Monday, January 8, 2007

As Promised, Berlin, From Sexerati with Love

filed under: We Make Art Not Sex, Jet Sex by Melissa Gira

Back when I relaunched Sexerati, I asked you where I ought to visit in Europe as a sex correspondant while I was overseas already for the Nordic Exceptional Trendshop (masterfully covered by we-make-money-not-art).

Berlin won out, not in small part due to the chance to visit the Helmut Newton Foundation, photographed from inside & secretly above. In the foreground is a David LaChapelle, with a Helmut Newton life-sized nude portrait peering in through the door.

I wish I could have shot more, but as I was not wanting to have a nonconsensual interrogation with German officials, you’ll have to imagine…

Just down the hall from here is what I like to call “the first webcam,” a self-shooting camera that Newton fabricated to render himself as the photographer irrelevant. Models could stand in front of the camera, pose themselves using a mirror behind it, and with the exposure preset by Newton, could trigger the camera shutter to open and close in rapid succession for over 200 images, with minute long pauses, much like camgirls do.

Downstairs, Helmut Newton’s personal collection of cameras, books from his library, and fetish objects from his most famous images competed for attention with sheaves and sheaves of faxes and cables from him to his editors, and to him from his admirers. This is the man who got Manolo Blahnik to design for him.

I lost myself between the two floor-to-ceiling cases of cameras in their leather sacks, embossed with HN and some bearing faded stickers from world travel, aiming their stilled lenses back at me. If only I could have the chance to come under that gaze…

This is the closest there is.

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