But what would be the raison d’etre of photographing them with their clothes on? I mean you can evolve you can change

But what would be the raison d’etre of photographing them with their clothes on? I mean, you can evolve, you can change, but you can’t get out of your skin. June has done a video about me, and at one point she says, ‘If someone were to drop dead in front of Helmut’s camera, he would try to arrange the corpse.’ I’m a very ordered person.”And necrophilia may be where he is headed. From women emptied of humanity, to dummies, and then, in the late Seventies, he began shooting women wearing surgical appliances – neck braces, corsets. He has photographed June following an operation, himself with electrodes strapped to his chest after a heart attack.

And in the new edition of his occasional series of monographs, Newton’s Illustrated, a nude stands, back to the camera, in regulation high heels, fringed gauntlets covering her hands, with one leg encased in a complicated stainless steel brace, its tip almost piercing the flesh of her buttocks. “A doctor in Berlin made that for me,” says Helmut, without irony. “I told him exactly what I wanted.”"I like scars,” he adds, seriously. “I photograph women who’ve had bad operations, who’ve been badly sewn up.

And every time I have something done to me, which is often, I photograph myself I am very squeamish. I find I can face surprises better when I have a camera between me and the crisis.” And in his other pictures? Why the need for distance there? Disingenuity again: “I do reject cloying romanticism and soft focus, but I don’t look for my pictures to be cold. It just happens that way.”Newton admits to a different approach with his celebrity portraits – of actresses, aristos, pop stars – even some men. They are his best work, suffused with ego: playful, ironic, intimate and occasionally cruel “With portraits, it’s important to intrude,” he says. “I’m an admirer of paparazzi – that’s the ultimate intrusion. But I ask my subjects to present themselves in front of my camera I think it’s important if you do a portrait… I will obviously decide how I photograph it, the place and the situation, but it’s very important that I don’t make this person into another person.”So he has Sigourney Weaver in lustrous black-and-white drag, playing off her androgynous screen image – and her appeal to both sexes and all sexualities.

And again, as screen goddess, standing, legs splayed, arms flung back in triumph, on rolls of discarded film. He has Michael Caine and his wife, Shakira, in full dinner uniform, lying on a sun lounger by a huge swimming pool, luxuriating in wealth Were they complicit? He won’t say. Or there’s Jackie Bisset as aspiring high-class sex symbol in fishnet tights and a slimy slip that could come from Anne Summers.Most of these, like the majority of his pictures, were done to commission He prefers to work that way, he says, getting animated now “I need the frame within which to function. I find it more difficult to please myself than when someone comes to me and says they want to sell something – jewels or hardware or clothes.”This means of course, that in the case of models and nudes, the fantasy, the “statement” can always be made to fit the brief. It is this limitation, this failure of imagination if you like, that has consigned Newton ever to be the voyeur, peering through the window of the serious major galleries But he doesn’t really care.