Photographer, died on January 23, 2004 at the age of 83 in Los Angeles

My father told me that I would end my life in the bottom because I only think about girls and photographs.

On my twelfth birthday, my father gave me my first camera - and I took my first seven photographs, on the subway. There was nothing visible on them at all. I took the eighth photo at the radio tower.

The world is completely different when you look at it through the viewfinder.

I got a job as a photographer's assistant when I was 14 and didn't tell my parents. My grades became worse than ever, my father took my camera and did not allow me to leave the house.

As a child, I would take pictures of my friends on the street wearing my mom's clothes and hats.

In 1938, the Gestapo broke into our house and arrested my father. I was not at home at that moment. I hid with a friend for two weeks and then escaped - I came to Italy, boarded a ship in Trieste, got off in Singapore and eventually made it to Melbourne.

If you have to fight, do it in the Australian Army. Everything about her is somehow more relaxed and human.

I fell in love with Paris on the first day. After a week I could already move around the city with my eyes closed, and after a year I ran out of money.

I hate good taste. This is a boring phrase that suffocates all living things.

In December 1971, in New York, I suddenly fell on Park Avenue and woke up in the hospital half paralyzed - I had a myocardial infarction. I could neither speak nor write. When you go through something like this and survive, you start making promises to yourself.

Before the heart attack , I smoked fifty cigarettes a day, after which I didn’t smoke a single one. Before the heart attack, I behaved like a young man - I did not live up to my age. For example, three months before the stroke, I spent six days in Rome partying endlessly, during which time I slept maybe eighteen hours, and then I flew to Paris, and the same thing happened there. In general, this had to be stopped.

In the hospital, I filmed everything on a soap box: nurses, visitors, doctors. After ten days of uncertainty, the doctor told me: “You will live, but be careful.” And I decided that now I will only shoot what interests me.

I quickly got tired of photographing naked models - it’s even more boring than clothes.

Pornography can be beautiful.

Bourgeois women are more erotic than hairdressers or secretaries. Elegance, education, environment - I believe in these things; I’m sometimes ashamed of this, but it’s true. A high society woman is sexual by nature.

I hate it when everything is inside out - it's cheap.

The women I photograph are available, but their availability depends on the time and money you have to spend on them.

I once did a series of photographs for Oui magazine. They showed naked women in fur coats - in the subway, galleries, on the Champs-Elysees. This was my childhood fantasy. When I was fourteen, I read Young Lady Elsa by Arthur Schnitzler, a story about a bankrupt banker and his seventeen-year-old beautiful daughter. One man told her that he would help her father if she agreed to walk along the hotel corridor in a naked fur coat. She agreed - she left her room and walked around this man, opening her fur coat. He didn't even touch her, but he kept his promise.

My work is very vulgar. The creative process in general is inextricably linked with bad taste and vulgarity.

Fashion editors constantly put scarves, flats, and flowy clothes on their models that hide their bodies and fill me with anger. They constantly choose things that a normal man would consider anti-sexual. Would I make love to a girl dressed like this? This is the first question I ask myself when I shoot fashion.

Good taste is anti-photogenic, anti-feminine, anti-erotic, it’s some kind of anti-fashion. Vulgarity is life, pleasure and desire.

Voyeurism in photography is a necessary and professional perversion.

I'm very lazy. I hate looking for filming locations and never go more than three kilometers from my hotel.

I love chic old hotels like the Ritsa and prefer them to depressive, cold, modern hotels where you feel like you’re in a prison.

Once I was filming in a brothel. The owner was against it at first, but in the end he agreed - he gave me a room on one of the quiet days, on Sunday. I showed up with a model, an assistant, a hairdresser, and an assistant hairdresser. The owner saw us and exclaimed: “Did you come here to have an orgy or take pictures?”

I know what poverty is, and I'm not interested in it. I prefer to photograph rich people. It's too easy to photograph poor people.

I have a notebook where I write down all my thoughts: ideas, models and places. If I don't write something down, I'll forget everything.

Four cameras, five lenses, one flash, one Polaroid - all this fits in a suitcase weighing 17 kilograms and allows me to take any photo anywhere and under any conditions.

I am very superficial, I would rather shoot Catherine Deneuve than some scientist or writer. And I love this superficial world. I like everything artificial, beautiful and funny, I love it when fifty-year-old men date eighteen-year-old girls. And I hope this world never disappears.

We all copy someone at one point or another in our lives, but then we still have to go our own way.

I hate dishonesty in photography: pictures taken in the name of some artistic principle are fuzzy and grainy.

I dreamed of becoming a paparazzi.

My photographs are like stories that have no beginning, middle or end.

I shot for Playboy magazine for about twenty years, and even for them my work was sometimes too risky.

My favorite magazine is Housewives in Captivity. This is a porn magazine that used to be sold in Los Angeles. I don’t know if it still exists, but it was something to read!

Everyone looks the same now— sneakers and jeans all around.

In the early sixties, women had no waist. And in the eighties, Swedish, German and American models appeared - they were built like truckers, and I really liked that.

I don't see the difference between green and blue.

Maybe I once wanted to be a girl.

I've always liked cowboys - the way they look and walk. A cowboy's hands are always ready to grab a gun. So I make cowboys out of girls who are always ready to pull out a gun.

I actually made a porn film - but I showed it only once, in a museum.

I always have a monocle, a mouthpiece and a pair of false nipples in my bag .

I hate wedding photography.

For me, erotica is the face, not the genitals.

I don't need a perfect body, it's boring.

Good photographers are like well-bred children—they are seen but not heard.

Helmut Newton's Rules of Life