I was always struck by the distance between Helmut Newton and his photographs. There are artists where one immediately senses, upon seeing them speak, dress, or move, that their work stems from that very same energy. With Newton, I didn't feel that. Quite the opposite. When I started reading about his life, and later when I saw images of him in his older age, I found an almost endearing man, even serene, very far from the elegant violence, sexual risk, and defiant theatricality of many of his images.

Perhaps that's why he interested me so much. Because behind that appearance lay a radical imagination. A way of seeing capable of constructing cinematic, tense, ambiguous, sometimes uncomfortable, always recognizable scenes. Women with power, with distance, with an eroticism that didn't seek to please but to assert itself. Photographs that seemed to come from a very free, but also very precise place. There was nothing of naive improvisation in them. Everything was intention, control, staging.

The foundation allowed me to understand the true magnitude of that trajectory. It wasn't just the iconic images there. There was also the archive, the posters, the publications, the imprint of his studio, the feeling of being before an entire life dedicated to building his own language. That was perhaps what impacted me the most: seeing the power of a career taken to its ultimate consequences. Not a succession of good photographs, but a complete universe.

Shortly after returning from that trip, I bought the small edition of Taschen's Sumo. I didn't feel the need to own the large collector's edition, as I did with other photographers, but I did want to take that work home. To have it close. To return to it from time to time. Like someone who cherishes an important conversation.