What this Polaroid of Cindy Crawford reveals about a 1991 swimwear shoot

The first time Cindy Crawford worked with the photographer Helmut Newton, the supermodel shed her all-American persona for a dalliance with Monte Carlo for US Vogue. Now, a lesser-seen outtake from the shoot is back on view.

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. Newton was known for bringing sexuality to the fore of his images, from his noir, nude studies of women in his studio space, hotel rooms and cars to his infamous fetish portrait of a model wearing a horse saddle on a bed. “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.