Springs, Newton and Engelen in Berlin

05/09/2016

Helmut Newton, The Woman on Level 4, I, Monte Carlo, 2000 © Helmut Newton Estate

On June 1st Berlin Helmut Newton Foundazion opens its summer exhibition - under the title „ Alice Springs: The MEP Show l Helmut Newton: Yellow Press l Mart Engelen: Portraits“ it combines not only three artists, but three different approaches to photography.
Since 1970 June Newton, widow of the legendary fashion- and nude-photographer Helmut Newton, works under the name of Alice Springs. Both have been exhibiting together, in especial in the project „Us and Them“. In 2010 the first retrospective of Alice Springs was realized in the Helmut Newton Foundation; now the second retrospective, deriving from the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) of 2015, will be shown in Berlin, accompanied by a publication at Taschen publishers.
In numerous portrays of her colleagues, Richard Avedon, Brassaï, Ralph Gibson and of course Helmut Newton, and other stars like Nicole Kidman, Audrey Hepburn, Christopher Lambert or Claude Chabrol, Alice Springs succeeded in capturing not only their semblances but also their auras. The silent dialogue in the sittings seems to be based on a kind of connection between souls.
The intensive pictures both in black and white and color are supplemented by a series of various street scenes from Melrose Avenue, L.A., where Alice Springs documented the 80´s californian Punk- an Hip Hop-scene- This anarchic youth culture wore radical haircuts and piercings and denied capitalism.
Only some years later, the protest movement, fueled by fashion and music, ebbed away - what stayed was the shown artistic documentation, Punks posing and the photographer shooting: empathic pictures, showing feeling and openness, both rendering the work of Alice Springs interesting up to the present.
Helmut Newton didn´t work on assignments for designers or fashion publications. He was interested also in the adverse, Paparazzi shots, police and crime - the Yellow Press, a mixture from the glossy pages and penny-farthings.
The exhibition „Yellow Press“ was selected by Newton himself and shown firstly in 2002 in his then Zurich Gallery, a melange of diverse genres, from 1973 to 2002. Several hitherto unpublished pics, called f.i. „Self Appropriation“, a Nude-series „Lolita“ and - for „Paris Match“ - a spectacular trial in Monaco.

More information at: www.helmutnewton.com