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.
I like to think of myself at home in the armchair, writing, smoking and occasionally wandering down the shop.
l photograph what l do not wish to paint and l paint that which l cannot photograph.
ELECTED Silence, sing to me And beat upon my whorlèd ear, Pipe me to pastures still and be The music that I care to hear.
At its best, film should be like a ski jump. It should give the viewer the option of taking flight, while the act of jumping is left up to him.
One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.
There is force and vitality in a first sketch from life which the after-work rarely has. You want a picture to seize you as forcibly as if a man had seized you by the shoulder! It should impress you like reality!
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