Helmut Newton & Alice Springs. Us and Them

There had never been such a project and has not been one since: husband-and-wife photographers published very personal, even intimate, self-portraits and portraits of each other taken over several decades and supplemented these private photographs with portraits of personalities and celebrities from the jet-set culture. In 1998, Helmut and June Newton published their legendary joint project Us and Them, in book form and in accompanying exhibitions. It illustrates an incomparable story of fifty-five years of life and love, with the first part of Us and Them offering us a view into the photographers' private life. It is a kind of photographic diary that records the life that Helmut and June Newton shared in photographs they took of each other. There are also photographs of actors, artists, and other important cultural figures of the time, including Brassaï and Peter Beard, Yves Saint Laurent and Thierry Mugler, Jane Birkin and Charlotte Rampling. The portraits taken by Helmut and June Newton in various sittings are presented side by side in pairs, thus revealing two facets of the same personality. This publication thus closes the circle in several ways, because the life and work of Helmut and June Newton were linked in many ways. One is not possible without the other—and vice versa. Accompanying exhibition: Alice Springs. Retrospective, through November 19, 2023, Helmut Newton Foundation, Berlin. In 1970, June Newton, aka Alice Springs, officially began taking photographs in three genres—fashion, nudes, and portraits in particular—but even before that, she took numerous photographs of her husband, which are shown in this exhibition. The Berlin retrospective is concluded by the juxtaposition of portrait diptychs by Helmut Newton and Alice Springs—primarily from the Us and Them project.