One moment in a busy Rome street led us to a retrospective Exhibition of Helmut Newton’s High Fashion photography.

Helmut Newton (born Helmut Neustädter; 31 October 1920 – 23 January 2004) was a German-Australian photographer. The New York Times described him as a “prolific, widely imitated fashion photographer whose provocative, erotically charged black-and-white photos were a mainstay of Vogue and other publications.

Most of us only glimpse the pages of Vogue but his photographs escaped the rarified pages of Fashion magazines and became iconic images of their eras.

He also photographed icons

Loving art and photography is a funny old habit. Under normal circumstances my head and heart would have looked forward to seeing this exhibition, possibly for many months. As it was we spotted the poster less than 24 hours before we were due to leave Rome. We had to squeeze our visit into the journey from hotel to train station. There was already serendipity built into the exhibition even being there during our visit as it had been scheduled to open during the first dreadful months of Covid, when Italy was particularly affected. The reschedule was our good fortune.

But when serendipity strikes it is always a good idea to grasp it. So even though there was only 1 1/2 hours between the exhibition opening and our train leaving we made the most of our moment.