The Worst of Times: Every bloody night I came home crying: Helmut Newton

IN 1956, Vogue offered me a contract for a year doing fashion pictures.

I came to England from Australia, full of hope, in a white 356b Porsche with red leather upholstery; nobody had a Porsche in those days, and people were stopping on the street to look at the car.

The editor was a sweet old duck, but I found out very quickly that everything I wanted to do in photography was unacceptable. I knew that I wanted to take very sexy pictures, but they had never heard of sexy fashion photographs. For instance, I had a girl leaning up against a lamp post, and the editor said: 'A lady does not lean against a lamp post . . .'

The fashion was horrible: sweaters, twinsets and pearls, flat heels, and the models were dreadful. Totally boring, dreary. Like soup without salt. Afterwards, we had Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton, and things started to move, but then it was dreary; the whole town was dreary. So my pictures were very dull. My pictures were duller than other people's pictures even, my pictures were incredibly dull. Twinsets and pearls] Dreary.

It was a totally stultifying time for me, and also I didn't like

England.

Vogue was in Golden Square then. It was a horrible building, straight out of Dickens. To come from sunny Australia and then to go into this Dickensian atmosphere was totally depressing.

Every bloody night I came home crying, with my tail between my legs.

And every day I would lose my way from my apartment to Golden Square because I hated everything so much. That job completely disoriented me; I just couldn't find my way around London. And I never get lost. For instance, when I went to Paris I was like a cab driver in three months, and in Los Angeles, which I love, I don't have any problems.

Also, I live by the weather. I can tell you what the temperatures were yesterday in Miami, in New York, in Berlin. That's why I live in Monaco, one of the big bonuses is the weather.

The weather there was horrible. Horrible. Grey light. I am the kind of photographer who likes photographing in the desert, I love midday light. But there was no light, just that soft grey light, that, as the French say, ca me fait chier, it makes me shit.

And I didn't look so good because I didn't get any sun, I mean, I looked like a piece of cheese.

The English are not a very visual people. If you want to be a fashion photographer, you don't go to London. Even today, there are only two cities in the world you can be, and that is Paris and New York. Maybe Milan. But London is not about fashion. The English do not understand fashion. There are people such as Katharine Hamnett, all right, she has got some kind of vision, but en generale . . .

Well, dreary is the word.

The whole thing just made me tremendously unhappy. After six months, I knew I had to get out. I threw everything in my Porsche, wife included, and went to Paris.

Vogue wouldn't have missed me, I was no great loss to them. No asset, no great loss.

I crossed the Channel and once I could see the white cliffs of Dover recede forever, I was fine. I drove into Paris and everything was great, hunky-dory.

And you know what? Touch wood, professionally, it just exploded, and it hasn't stopped, and the older I get the more fascinated I get with my work. It's entirely different now.

But that period was a total waste of time.

(Photograph omitted)