I hate good taste. It's the worst thing that can happen to a creative person.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that conforming to what is considered good taste can stifle creativity.
Helmut Newton expresses a provocative viewpoint that adhering to conventional standards of good taste can hinder the originality and inventiveness of a creative individual. He implies that the freedom to explore unconventional ideas and aesthetics is essential for true artistic expression and innovation, and that a rigid adherence to taste can negatively impact creativity.
In practice
This quote can be used in an art class to encourage students to think outside the box.
I have always avoided photographing in the studio. A woman does not spend her life sitting or standing in front of a seamless white paper background. Although it makes my life more complicated, I prefer to take my camera out into the street... and places that are out of bounds for photographers have always had a special attraction for me.
I like photographing women who appear to know something of life. I recently did a session with a great beauty, a movie star in in her thirties. I photographed her twice within three weeks and the second time I said: "You're much more beautiful today than you were three weeks ago." And she replied: "But I'm also three weeks older.
They often ask me to shoot for them. But I say no. I think an old guy like me ought not take pages away from young photographers who need the exposure.
I am very attracted by bad taste-it is a lot more exciting than that supposed good taste which is nothing more than a standardized way of looking at things.
The point of my photography has always been to challenge myself, to go a little further than my Germanic discipline and Teutonic nature would traditionally permit me to.
My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.
It's always about the music, never about anything else.
I think we're going to enter a phase where there's less interest in the CGI and there's a demand for story again. I think we've dropped the ball a little bit on stories for the sake of the amazing toys that we've played with.
You move just a finger, say the slightest word, something's bound to linger-be heard.
Before I was ever a poet, my father was writing poems about me, so it was a turning of the tables when I became a poet and started answering, speaking back to his poems in ways that I had not before.
My feeling is that for years now it has taken a much too big part in how women are being visually defined today. Heartless retouching should not be the chosen tool to represent women in the beginning of this century.
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