Hands, Bordighera, 1982

This image, and that in lot 263 are from a dramatic and pivotal series that marked Newton's return to work after a period of depression during which he wondered if he would ever pick up a camera again. He had left Paris after the May 1981 Socialist victory and settled in Monte Carlo. It proved a difficult time. His trauma is described in his autobiography. He also explains how he was eventually lifted from his gloom and inspired by the small Italian seaside town of Bordighera to fulfill an open brief for Italian Vogue.

The result was a politically provocative fashion shoot 'Rich Girl, Poor Girl' and a remarkable series of close-ups, made in September 1982, that were published in Egoïste, no. 7 under the title 'Details de Bordighera'.

In 1981 Helmut Newton asked Joan Juliet Buck, then a young novelist, to make the text of his book "World Without Men" more provocative. She complied. As thanks, Newton gave her the following two photographs with inscriptions that referred to her as "my favorite dirty writer". Her own erotic novel, "Daughter of the Swan", came out in 1987.
Buck was Editor-in-Chief of French Vogue from 1994 to 2001.