The second half of the 20th century would have happened without Helmut Newton, but what would it have looked like? The Berlin-born photographer, who was briefly imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp as a teenager and eventually fled to Australia, was one of the world’s defining fashion photographers from 1961 until his death in 2004. As Vicki Goldberg wrote for Vanity Fair, he “made breaching taboos so chic and so acceptable to the haute bourgeoisie that celebrities and socialites rushed to be reimagined by his audacious, excessive, sly, decadent (even, on occasion, kindly) lens.” 

As what would have been Newton’s 100th birthday approaches, Berlin’s Helmut Newton Foundation is staging a large outdoor exhibition of the photographer’s work, both along an 85-meter wall in Kreuzberg and in 250 City Light posters displayed throughout the city. “What Newton did best, repeatedly, was to produce uncomfortably memorable images,” Goldberg wrote. Ahead, a look back at but a few of them.