until Sunday February 16 2025
Helmut Newton Foundation
T : +49 (0)30 31 86 48 25
Jebensstrasse 2
10623 Berlin
Germany
Press Inquiries
Nadine Dinter
press@helmut-newton-foundation.org
https://helmut-newton-foundation.org
The Helmut Newton Foundation celebrates its 20th anniversary in June 2024 with the group show Berlin, Berlin, and simultaneously pays tribute to the city where Newton was born. The Helmut Newton Foundation is celebrating its 20th anniversary in June 2024 with this group exhibition, which is also a tribute to Newton's hometown. In the fall of 2003, the photographer decided to transfer parts of his archive to Berlin by first establishing the foundation named after him, which was housed in the former Landwehrkasino at Zoologischer Garten train station. From that station, Newton, who as a Jew in Nazi Germany was constantly threatened with deportation, left Berlin in a hurry in December 1938 and returned 65 years later as a world-famous photographer.
Helmut Newton trained under the legendary photographer Yva in Berlin-Charlottenburg from 1936 to 1938, following in her footsteps to carve his path in the three genres of fashion, portraits, and nudes. After stints in Singapore and Melbourne, Newton’s career took off in Paris in the early 1960s, a period during which he frequently returned to Berlin for fashion shoots in magazines like Constanze, Adam, and Vogue Europe. In this exhibition, we encounter Newton’s models posing at Brandenburg Gate before the 1961 construction of the Berlin Wall. We also see his controversial 1963 fashion series, Mata Hari Spy Story, featuring Brigitte Schilling near the Berlin Wall. In 1979, the newly relaunched German Vogue commissioned Newton to retrace his childhood and youth in West Berlin, visualizing current fashion trends. The result was a multi-page portfolio titled Berlin, Berlin! – which inspired the name of this anniversary exhibition. Newton later shot cover stories in Berlin for Condé Nast Traveler (1987), Zeit magazine (1990), Männer Vogue (1991), and the Süddeutsche Zeitung magazine (2001).
The other exhibition rooms recontextualize Newton’s iconic and lesser-known images of Berlin from the 1930s to the 2000s. From vintage prints by Yva to Barbara Klemm’s political photojournalism, these images span the Golden Twenties into which Newton was born, the devastation of World War II, postwar reconstruction, the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall, into the early 21st century.
Photo: Hein Gorny, Siegessäule, Berlin 1945
