His first photography book, White Women, was published when Newton was already 56 years old, in 1976. The book received the Kodak Photobook Award shortly thereafter and has enjoyed numerous reprints ever since. In White Women, Newton used nudity within the visual world of fashion. While such unusual pictures both astonished and provoked the scene, above all, they revolutionized fashion photography. Furthermore, Newton’s photographs both reflect and comment on the transformation of the role of women in western society at the time. Inevitably, Newton makes us observers into voyeurs.

For Helmut Newton, fashion often seems to be an excuse to realize something different and very individual. The black and white and color photographs in Newton’s 1978 book Sleepless Nights, previously published in various magazines, are also all about women, their bodies and their clothes; fashion shots that are simultaneously portraits, or which could double as crime scene documentation photos. Here for the first time are also three smaller series, which would later be counted among Newton’s iconic images: half-naked, female models in orthopedic body braces or wearing leather saddles by Hermès, as well as the so-called "dummies". His second publication Sleepless Nights also features mannequins that are mostly in amorous combination with a person.

With his third publication Big Nudes, Helmut Newton, who was by then in his early 60s, had secured his seat atop the Mount Olympus of photography. Since its first publication in 1981, the book has been reprinted thousands of times, by numerous publishing houses and in multiple languages. Newton explains the creation of Big Nudes, in his autobiography: it was the large-format "wanted" posters by the German police of the RAF (Red Army Fraction terrorist group) that inspired him to take full-length nude pictures in the studio with his medium format camera, producing from these life-size prints. Soon after their creation the monumental pictures were shown in various museums; with his Big Nudes and the subsequent life-sized images from his Naked and Dressed series, Newton had opened up a new dimension of the photographic human image, the latter series was realized plein air in spring 1981 for the Italian Vogue.