Nipples, legs and aliens

In what has to be the Barbican's highest nipple count ever, veteran Aussie photographer Helmut Newton brings you breasts popping out of furs, falling out of corsets, big, small, round and tiny. And he brings you legs!

Elongated, sinewy, bony pins tottering on stilettos and ankle-cuffed in studded leather. And he brings you flesh! Acres and acres of firm, taut skin. Welcome to the world of Helmut Newton, where women are knickerless ice-maidens, bondaged and bound to perfection, ready to eat mankind alive for breakfast - that is, if any of them eat breakfast, which I doubt.

Herein lies the ambiguity of Newton's photography: do these pictures monumentalise the female sex, or render us mere dolls of fetishistic fantasy? By the time you see his eerie series of shop window dummies mix-and-matched with real women, the answer should be clear. You find yourself looking for arm joints everywhere in order to identify the humans. Every woman has the wonderfully blank expression of "Georgette", his favourite plastic mannequin. In fact, these are the best works in the show. But Seventies feminists were spot-on when they concluded that blokes like Newton were secretly pining for a penis, not a woman. According to their (very Freudian) reading, these girls are hard, pink and shiny like a you know what. And nearly all of them brandish a corny phallic substitute, whether it be a cigar, truncheon, gun, or toy warship.

I'm not knocking the work: it's iconic and entertaining, but these girls are alien. The only two photos that even hint at pungent human life stand out a mile: a bejewelled hand stuffing a chicken, and a heavily made-up woman dabbing her eyes with a bright red slab of raw meat.

In their stiff and frozen postures, Newton's women lack the earthiness of Brassai's prostitutes, the exuberance of Ellen von Unwerth's glamour girls and the irony of all the Nineties fashion photography that has followed.

Yet this stick-insect rigidity is Newton's trademark: if it's your bag, this show cannot fail to please, with its deep maroon walls and lifesize nudes. The only photos guaranteed to grate are his tragic attempts to bring a porno frisson to the sponsors of this show - the curviest yet least erotic of cars, the VW Beetle.

Helmut Newton at the Barbican Gallery , until 8 July.