A wonderful 1999 British TV movie called Shooting the Past recently aired on Vision TV, which is appropriate considering that the film is about how different people see the same world different ways. The subject was photography. Most films in which picture-taking plays a central role--Blow-up and Eyes of Laura Mars, for example--focus on fashion and assume a tone of detachment. The camera is linked to sociopathological behaviour as it objectifies people with its dead fish-eye lens.

Shooting the Past's warmth is a relief, conveying as it does the power of photography to tell unforgettable, stirring stories. A library of 10 million carefully catalogued snapshots is threatened when an American corporation buys the central-London estate housing it. Desperate to persuade the company head how important it is to keep the collection intact, the library's curator tries appealing to his humanity by showing him a heart-wrenching series of photos chronicling an attempt to smuggle a Jewish girl out of Nazi-occupied Germany.

It's a plight familiar to Helmut Newton. A German-born Jew, the fashion-photograph giant died at 83 in a car accident in Los Angeles on January 23. He was best known for his controversial portraits of well-muscled ice queens posing in coldly calculated B & D and S & M tableaux that seemed to blend the decadence of Christopher Isherwood's I Am a Camera Berlin with the Aryan statuary of Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl's propagandistic homage to Third Reich superiority. In 1938, and none too soon, the teenaged Newton (who would photograph Riefenstahl years later) hightailed it out of Germany. He worked in Singapore as a photojournalist, then Australia, where he was married, and finally, in 1957, he moved to Paris and a career in fashion. He spent the rest of his life dividing his time between France and the United States.

In 1961, he began a long association with French Vogue. His work also appeared in American, Italian, and German Vogue and magazines such as Marie-Claire, Elle, and Playboy. Clearly, his mind's eye couldn't shake the impressions of his youth. It's safe to say that Newton was neither a sentimentalist nor a romantic. Straddling guard dogs, consumed by crocodiles, accessorized with cuts of meat, or overpowering the camera in dominatrix stances, his fetishized, fascistic Amazons were emotionally untouchable yet physically available.

"The women you see in my photographs are my ideal women. The less I know of them, the better," Newton once said in an interview. No one had seen anything like it, and feminists of the '60s and '70s understandably objected. But Newton wouldn't stand down. If every picture tells a story, then images too must be accorded freedom of speech. Today, we can view Newton's work at a nonhysterical distance as a brilliant, satirical exposé of society's obsession with fetishes, whether we're attending mass, whipping up some sex play in a dungeon, or selling frocks and shoes.

Francesco Scavullo was accused of fetishizing women too. (How you can work in fashion and not beats me.) Probably the most influential fashion photographer of them all, he also died last month, on January 6 in New York City of a heart attack. He was 82. His star rose at the same time Newton's did, but their styles could not have been more different: Newton aimed to threaten; Scavullo, to please. He set the template for flaw-free, characterless, superstar glamour, creating the impossible expectations for women that now saturate pop culture. He could make anyone beautiful, and did, sacrificing both individuality and social commentary. Hence his enormous success. But he was an equal-opportunity objectifier. The men he shot were just as pretty as the women.

His work appeared in Vogue, Mademoiselle, Glamour, Rolling Stone, Life, Time, Harper's Bazaar, and many other magazines. His celebrity glam shots are legendary and include Cher, Madonna, Diana Ross, Grace Kelly, Brooke Shields, and, well, perhaps every famous person on the planet except, he once joked, the pope. But it was his 30 years doing covers for Cosmopolitan, from 1965 to 1995, that put him on the map. He created the Cosmo girl.

It's curious that men are singled out as the fashion world's perpetrators of objectification when mostly women run the magazines and set the content. Although the late Diana Vreeland (Harper's Bazaar, Vogue) was arguably the most powerful fashion editor ever, Helen Gurley Brown is perhaps the most notorious. She took the helm of Cosmopolitan after the publication of Sex and the Single Girl. Her bestseller urged women to use sex appeal to get what they wanted. It came out around the same time Gloria Steinem published her famous essay, "I Was a Playboy Bunny", in which she exposed the exploitative sexism of Hugh Hefner's empire. But Gurley Brown knew what Hef knew: sex sells, and if there was ever a successful codependent relationship, it's the one between fashion and sex. Even if we don't like what we see when men have shot the past, let's not kill the messengers. As different as night and day, the photographs of Newton and Scavullo have permanently altered our pop-culture consciousness. The two men made their mark.