What This Polaroid Of Cindy Crawford Reveals About A 1991 Swimwear Shoot

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The first time Cindy Crawford worked with the provocative fashion photographer Helmut Newton, the supermodel shed her all-American persona for a dalliance with Monte Carlo for US Vogue. The swimwear shoot, published in the November 1991 issue , famously featured Crawford in a dark one-piece and heels standing on a public monument in the luxe Monégasque district, as well as erotically laying on stage in front of three blindfolded musicians.

But a lesser-seen Polaroid image of the shoot will soon go on view, part of a wider showing of Polaroids by the late German-Australian photographer and his peers. The outtake of Crawford shows her in a black swimsuit and trench coat cinched with a wide gold belt, descending the stairs in front of a grand opera house — one of many times she did so in front of an audience of passersby, out of frame. It's a more casual, preliminary image for a scene that ultimately didn't make the cut in Vogue, providing an alternate view of a formative collaboration at the height of the supermodel phenomenon.

"It was more or less used by (Newton) as a sketch," Matthias Harder, director and curator of the Helmut Newton Foundation, told CNN. The foundation organized the show, " Polaroids ," running as part of the biennial European Month of Photography festival in Berlin, until July 27.

"Especially in the '90s, he was using a lot of Polaroids to prepare the shoot, control the composition and the lighting, and so on," Harder added. The one-of-a-kind images have since become a set of works all on their own, featuring in both exhibitions and books, including a monograph by the photographer, titled "Pola Woman," in 1992, and a second anthology by Taschen in 2011.

"I loved working with Helmut… He had a sense of humor about his photographs, even some of the more sexualized ones," Crawford said in a 2021 video for Vogue.

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