Helmut Newton, who has died aged 83 after losing control of his car in Los Angeles, will probably be best remembered for those images which, finally, he did not find the most important. What mattered to him, he said, were nights, cities and portraits of striking or loved individuals, but what was most closely associated with his name were highly made-up, statuesque women, most often nude but for their stiletto heels and, possibly, a clear plastic mack or a saddle on their back.
They became the predominant subject not only of his fashion shoots, mainly for Vogue, but for books with titles such as Femmes Secrètes, Sleepless Nights and A World Without Men. Newton brought fetishism to eroticism and then took both into mainstream photography at a time, in the 1970s, when they were assumed to belong only to those with rarefied tastes who sought them out on the top shelves.
He was born Helmut Neustädter, into a middle-class family in Weimar republic Berlin, where decadence and smoky nostalgia were the order of every film, poster, song or cabaret of the day. In love with Marlene Dietrich, so he said, from the time he attended the American School, where he went at the age of 12, he met her years later when they were both in New York and he was to take her portrait.
The meeting was not a success - she took umbrage at a light-hearted comment - and the portrait was never taken. Yet her androgynously sensual presence pervaded his obsessive fascination with strikingly tall models wearing the glossily lacquered hairstyles and the seamed stockings of the 1940s.
Newton bought his first camera in 1932, and by the age of 17 had apprenticed himself to the theatrical photographer Yva (Else Simon). The situation in Berlin became increasingly more dangerous for Jews, and in 1938 he left for Singapore, and then Australia. From 1940 to 1945 he served in the Australian Army, and after settling in Sydney, he met and, in 1948, married the photographer and actress June F Browne, also known as June Brunell, and, more improbably, as Alice Springs. Her influence seems to have been considerable: the notion of a model as actress is hardly a new one, but Browne's collaboration with Newton, on both sides of the camera, was substantial.
Not only did she dress up and model extensively in a series of storytelling tableaux vivants, but she lent her lighting and scene-setting skills to the preparation of a number of his images. Later on, she would coach his models to pose for him in roles that played on the whimsical cruelties of a dominatrix. This not only enhanced the notion of the photographer/voyeur, but necessarily rendered all viewers fellow-accomplices in the implicitly sadomasochistic sexual fantasy.
The Newtons remained in Australia for 17 years. Helmut worked primarily as a fashion photographer, and assumed Australian nationality, but was hankering for Europe. In 1956, the pair spent a year in London before moving to Paris, where they lived until 1981. The shift to French Vogue gave Newton the opportunity to contribute his particular brand of fashion photography to the Jardin des Modes, Elle, Queen, Nova, Marie-Claire, Stern and to Playboy.
It was not until the 1970s that Newton began to attract the international attention that would contextualise his work within a different tradition. He was described ambitiously (by Klaus Honnef) as "following in the tradition created by Adolphe de Meyer, and developed by Hoyningen-Heine, Steichen, Munkacsi, Blumenfeld, Horst, Penn and Avedon", while Newton's friend, the couturier Karl Lagerfeld, claimed he subscribed to the dictum that: "The concept of art should not kill the concept of artificiality, because that's where its artistic expression comes from." Newton also said that "everything that is beautiful is a fake. The most beautiful lawn is plastic".
This puts him in compatible company with an artist like Allen Jones, whose woman on all fours supporting a glass tabletop has much in common with Newton's models. Newton produced his first portrait of a giant, a large figure somewhat resembling another couturier, Yves Saint-Laurent, with a nude, reduced to the dimensions of a doll and clad only in silver high heels with a red feather boa over her arm, in 1974.
By 1975, Newton was exhibiting his fashion portraits, both in colour and black-and-white, in New York, Paris and Amsterdam. Japan soon followed, and the popularisation of his particular fetishistic interests extended to global tours. The books followed, usually in three editions (German, French and American), at times in limited editions.
The meticulous quality of his work, and his success in crossing fashion with transgression, guaranteed Newton's inclusion in major collections such as London's Victoria and Albert museum, the Bibliothèque Nationale and the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris, the Nikon Photo Gallery, Zurich, and New York's Museum of Modern Art and the Fashion Institute of Technology. In the US, Newton was represented by the gallerist Xavier Moreau, whom he took - in a rare portrait of a man - swathed in a large black coat and behind black sunglasses, his "girlfriend" across his lap, naked but for her black bra and stilettos.
Newton rarely granted interviews, although in 1978 he agreed to a 55-minute show for Thames Television. He was disarming in the defence of his output. "I love vulgarity. I am very attracted by bad taste - it is a lot more exciting than that supposed good taste, which is nothing more than a standardised way of looking at things." He then immediately diffused the enfant terrible aspect he had just projected: "All that sadomasochism still looks interesting to me today. I always carry chains and padlocks in my car trunk, not for me but for my photos - by the way, I never make the knots real tight."
In a series on hotel rooms, Newton himself appears lying fully clothed beneath his model on an unmade bed. His hand holds what at first looks like a whip but is in fact only the camera release. Newton got a kick out of taking his models to real public venues and exposing their nakedness beneath a fur coat or mack, reversing the role more often associated with the "dirty old man".
Visually and artistically literate, he liked to "lead the viewer on a wild goose chase" where the models looked like mannequins and the mannequins looked like humans. He preferred pale skin and abundant curly hair - what he called nordfleisch (northern meat) - as best suiting the "cold women" he said he found attractive. It was his accomplishment to take a personal obsession, perfect its representation, and win prizes the world over by selling it through fashion magazines, gallery walls, advertising posters and his beloved books.
His wife was also in their car, but survived when it crashed into a wall; they had no children.
· Helmut Newton (Neustädter), photographer, born October 31 1920; died January 23 2004