Her name was June Browne and he was called Helmut Neustädter. He was a young Jewish photographer from Berlin who had landed in Australia after escaping from Nazi Germany. He then changed his surname to Newton and in 1947 he opened a photographic studio in Melbourne. She was a stage actress who showed up at her studio because someone told her he was looking for models. Within a year, they were husband and wife: Helmut and June Newton.
As a couple they developed a double and dazzling international photographic career throughout their lives, cultivating the same genres -fashion, portraiture, nudes-, each one under their own lens and style, always cooperating with each other and without any shadow of professional rivalry. She adopted the stage name of Alice Springs. He was perhaps more famous, but she, who joined photography later, shone with her own light with her black and white photos.
June Browne was born in Melbourne one hundred years ago now, and the Museum of Photography in Berlin, headquarters of the Helmut Newton Foundation, is dedicating a vast retrospective to her for this reason until November 19, in which her work is exhibited, in some rooms by itself. alone, and in others in parallel to photos taken by Helmut and images of life together, in Europe and the United States. He died in 2004 in Los Angeles at the age of 83, after suffering a heart attack behind the wheel of his car, which crashed into a wall. She died in 2021, at the age of 97, at his house in Monte Carlo. Both rest in the Berlin cemetery of Friedenau, chosen by June when she was widowed.
“There was never competition between the two; their lives and work were connected in countless ways, one is inconceivable without the other, and vice versa”, explains Matthias Harder, director of the Helmut Newton Foundation, created by the photographer himself at the end of 2003 to preserve his work and that of June.
She transitioned into professional photography by relative chance. The couple moved to Paris in 1961, where Helmut had been signed by Vogue magazine and where she could not work as an actress because of the language. One day in 1970, Helmut was supposed to portray a model for an advertising campaign for the French cigarette brand Gitanes, but she fell ill with the flu. Bedridden, he explained to his wife four rudiments about the camera and the light meter, and she went in her place to save the session.
“June was a fantastic photographer, spontaneous and fast, not looking into the background, unlike Helmut, who watched every detail of the composition,” continues Harder. June preferred not to include tricks in the lighting, almost all of her photos are taken with natural light; she and she rarely made studio portraits, normally she went to the houses or workshops of those portrayed, or she photographed them in front of a wall or in the street ”.
Among those who paraded before his lens between the 1970s and 1990s were figures from fashion, cinema and social media, such as Karl Lagerfeld, Carolina de Monaco, Yves Saint Laurent, Catherine Deneuve, Charlotte Rampling, Isabelle Adjani, Liam Neeson or Rupert Everett. He also photographed Spaniards like Carmen Maura or Ricard Bofill.
They all look at us from the framed photos on the walls of this Berlin exhibition. “His portraits of him capture the look, the moment, the character has an aura; they are portraits that exude intensity and authenticity,” argues Harder. It is likely that his solid foundation as a performer allowed him to look with his lens simultaneously at the facade of the person’s expression and behind it as well”.
June Newton had a brilliant photographic career, often in dialogue with that of her illustrious consort. She took photos for magazines such as Egoïste, Elle, Vanity Fair, Marie Claire or Stern, and for brand advertising campaigns, such as that of the Parisian hairdresser Jean-Louis David, in which Helmut dressed up as a nun. In the eighties, the couple began to live between Monaco and California.
Some of the 250 photos on display in Berlin are on display to the public for the first time, such as June’s latest ad campaign for a deodorant brand, shot in color in the United States in 2004, four days after Helmut’s death, which were who should do them “For her, work assignments always had to be fulfilled. We have traced the foundation’s file, after receiving material that was in his apartment in Monte Carlo”, explains Matthias Harder.
In June’s presence, the Helmut Newton Foundation was inaugurated in June 2004, housed in a former Prussian military casino converted into a Museum of Photography in Berlin, which is located opposite the Zoologischer Garten station, from which the young Helmut left Germany by train in 1938.
How did June choose her stage name? Helmut told him: “Maybe two photographers with the last name Newton is too many.” She, who had already had to change her name once in her public face – when she was June Browne she called herself June Brunell, to differentiate herself from another actress with a very similar name and surname -, blindfolded her eyes and stuck a pin into a Australian map. Chance made her DJ over the city of Alice Springs.
