Long live the 'King of Kink'

There is a moment in the 2007 film Helmut by June where the legendary photographer stares into the camera and says, pointedly: "I am not aware of being subversive. I must be doing something right."

There are many who would argue that Helmut Newton, who died in 2004 in a car crash outside his beloved Chateau Marmont hotel in Los Angeles, was nothing if not subversive. He loved his models nude, his images sexualised, with lashings of sado-masochism, fetishism, wanton nights and waylaid morals. Where other photographers put their focus on making their women beautiful and untouchable creatures, Newton's trademark was to portray them as real, flawed, raw, human.

His signature touch with the camera is on display at the Annenberg Space for Photography, in the exhibition "Helmut Newton: White Women. Sleepless Nights. Big Nudes.", named after his first three books. The retrospective - which went to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, two years ago and will run in Los Angeles until September 8 - features more than 100 prints, some as large as eight by eight feet, all of them bold and brassy and unadulterated Newton.

Close to the entrance of the space, which on a recent Sunday afternoon was filled with Eastside hipsters and the beautifully dressed Beverly Hills crowd, were two large shots, side by side and the perfect mirror into Newton's mind. In one a quartet of models stood on a catwalk, strong-jawed and immaculately dressed. Next to it, a photo showed the same women in exactly the same poses - the difference being that they were completely naked. In one of two films that run in adjoining rooms, one of the models in that set of photos explains how seeing herself nude like that made her truly see herself for the first time.

That is a recurrent theme: Newton, whose work was regularly featured in the glossy pages of international editions of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, didn't just see his role as that of selling clothes. Instead, he wanted to shine a light on the inner lives of the women he photographed, even if you have to look a little harder to see it.

In one of his images, a nude woman is reclining on a spread of fur, staring out through glass at a vista of New York City; the image instantly conveys luxury and decadence, but there is a loneliness in her eyes that defies the synthetic bravado of conventional fashion photography.

A Newton self-portrait has him spreadeagled, fully dressed, on an unmade bed, pointing a camera upwards, a naked person on top of him. He loved St Tropez, evidenced by a series of Amazonian bronzed women, caressing huge German shepherds, in landscapes that included glorious swimming pools and glamorous villas. His girls were all high heels and red lips, fishnets and sculpted hair. He was in his professional prime in the 1970s, his boldness at work in images like that of a model in a zebra-print dress reclining on a zebra-print couch, others featuring women kissing other women, or blindfolded, wearing capes or saddles, handcuffs and chains, images that continued to shock the establishment and that earned him the nickname, "king of kink".