One of the kind exhibition: Helmut Newton. Cars.

Have you ever heard of the amazing car events at Lake Como? Did you ever notice that al lot (and I mean… a lot) of Helmut Newton iconic photos had some pretty nice cars in them? Well, I wish I could teleport myself to Como, to see the wonderful exhibition “Helmut Newton. Cars”, at Villa Olmo, part of Fuori Concorso event. (Photo up: Helmut Newton – BMW Z1, Monaco 1991 © Helmut Newton Foundation)

Helmut Newton. Cars / Villa Olmo, Como/Italy (15 May – 30 June 2026)
As part of Fuori Concorso (16 – 17 May 2026)
https://www.fuoriconcorso.org/ https://newton-foundation.org/

The initiative was of… Italian luxury brand Larusmiani (celebrating this year 100 years of experience)

The pictures: from Newton Foundation, in the garden of Villa Olmo on Lake Como, which will be transformed into a vast open-air museum as part of the Fuori Concorso 2026, KraftMeister – where automotive culture becomes art. 

To see: across 20 large-format panels, the automobile is celebrated through a selection of Newton’s car photographs, taken between 1956 and 2001. At the same time, this is the first exhibition dedicated to this important theme in Newton’s body of work, which will be explored further in a larger presentation at the Berlin-based Newton Foundation in the near future. The exhibition is curated by Matthias Harder, Director of the Newton Foundation. 

The highlight: the first-ever presentation of a fashion photograph taken in Como, created in 1996 for Italian Vogue: a blonde woman with heavily teased hair, wearing a tight black cocktail dress, stands beside an Alfa Romeo Spider. In the open trunk, we see an opened briefcase filled with bundles of 100,000-lira banknotes. The sports car bears a license plate from the city of Como. The story behind this cache of banknotes is, of course, a matter of speculation – a strikingly characteristic and ambivalent element in Newton’s fashion imagery.

Helmut Newton and his love for cars

He had a lifelong passion for cars; it is therefore no surprise that this subject matter occupied an important place in his fashion photography over the decades, and that he later went on to produce and shoot advertising campaigns for numerous renowned automobile brands. It all began in the mid-1950s, when Newton, during a holiday trip to Rome, used his white Porsche 356 as a backdrop for a private portrait of his wife June on the Via Appia Antica – or shortly thereafter, back in Melbourne, in a fashion shoot for Australian Vogue. In the early 1960s, he photographed men’s fashion for Adam magazine at the Jaguar factory in Coventry, and women’s fashion in color, en plein air, for French Vogue, this time featuring a red Fiat 1200. In 1963, he portrayed Françoise Sagan in a Jaguar E-Type, also for French Vogue, while the British model Jean Shrimpton, in a Newton fashion shoot for British Vogue in 1966, was transformed into the hood ornament of a Rolls-Royce – miniaturized and collaged into the photographic composition.

Not only fashion, but Newton car campaigns…

The automobile appears countless times in his work, in a wide variety of situations – sometimes in the background as a kind of luxurious accessory, but also as an equal subject in its own right. In his advertising campaigns, for example for the New Beetle, created in Milan in 1999, or for Italdesign in the same year, he shifted the focus even more toward the automobile and its design, without, however, dispensing with human models.

Photography: (c) Helmut Newton Foundation.