“Because I work in fashion and am surrounded by those who are informed by his work, it’s hard for me to tell whether people in general are offended by him any more, but I doubt it. I mean, everyone’s been so educated by those images.”The designer Alexander McQueen, who will introduce an hour-long Q&A session at the Barbican tomorrow at the opening of the exhibition, says that he, too, owes more than a little to the great man’s work.”Newton photographed one of the dresses from my Dante collection in 1996,” he says. The collection was shown in a Gothic church in Spitalfields, east London, and offered an early glimpse of the sophistication that has made McQueen such a huge name in the fashion world. “He picked a black lace dress, worn in the show by Stella Tenant,” McQueen recalls. “It went right up over her face, covering it, like a hangman’s hood.

Newton said he liked the contrast between the fragility of the lace and the brutality of the act of enshrouding a woman’s face with it.”It is not insignificant that, while most people choose to shoot McQueen’s more obviously commercial garments ­ a wicked trouser suit, say, or an embroidered sheath dress ­ Newton selected one of the more challenging pieces. It was also an outfit that was far more true to McQueen’s macabre sensibility.Newton’s choice of McQueen as the designer to introduce him at the Barbican is clearly an inspired one. It is testimony to the photographer’s genius that, despite their difference in age ­ Newton is 80, McQueen only 32 ­ they have a lot in common. Both are preoccupied with the fine line between beauty and cruelty, fragility and brutality; both see gender as something fluid, to be experimented with. Most important, here are two people who push against the boundaries of what is and isn’t acceptable, as if their very existence depended on it. In this, they are the ultimate agents provocateurs, daring their audience to rise to the challenge they present in their work, to engage in a darker and more complex side of humanity.Helmut Newton was born to middle-class Jewish parents in Weimar Berlin in 1920, and the decadent spirit of that place at that time is imprinted on his work. He bought his first camera when he was 12, shooting his first film in the Berlin Metro.

By his mid-teens, he was photographing his girlfriends in his mother’s clothes, until, aged 16, he learnt to use a camera professionally, as apprentice to Else Simon, a society photographer who worked under the alias of Yva. She died later in Auschwitz.Newton and his parents fled Berlin in 1938. His mother and father went to South America; Helmut headed for Singapore, where he took a job as press photographer for the Singapore Straits Times.In 1940, he moved to Australia, where he met his future wife, June, in 1947. He married her a year later, and the two remain inseparable to this day. She is also a photographer; she famously photographed her husband in stilettos and collaborates with him, curating exhibitions and art-directing books of his work.In 1956, Newton left Melbourne, where he had set up his studio and was working for the newly launched Australian Vogue, and moved to London, where he had been given a contract with the more established and prestigious British edition of the magazine. He soon became bored of shooting still lifes of accessories for the magazine’s prosaic “Shop Hound” section and finally quit the title when required to turn his attention to “Mrs Exeter”, featuring, as he put it, “outfits for the more mature woman, with a blue-haired lady modelling the fashion”. By the early Sixties, Newton was in Paris and beginning to shoot his most influential work, this time for French Vogue.