Unbounded—that was the strange word bubbling up as I wandered Helmut Newton’s exhibition on a Berlin summer morning in 2019. It was only my fifth day in the city and already the relief of having arrived, and the giddiness for what lay ahead, was beginning to drain into a slowly dilating void. Looking at the naked decadence of those maximalist and oversized photographs, I couldn’t help but feel hopelessly depressed by it all. There was something reflected in these images; something about this performed, preening hedonism that was mesmerising but also meaningless. The exhibition seemed to prefigure our current, life-draining obsession—one that seeks to frame each moment as an image to be captured and then collaged into a performed version of ourselves. The more our reality is unbound into tiles and tweets and TikTok clips—the more we live within a curated version of life—the more our own sense of what is real and authentic becomes concealed.
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