The Helmut Newton Foundation celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2024 with the group show Berlin, Berlin and simultaneously pays tribute to the city where Newton was born. In the autumn of 2003, Helmut Newton established his foundation in Berlin to house parts of his archive, which opened to the public in June 2004, at the historic Landwehrkasino next to Zoologischer Garten station. It was from this very station that Helmut Neustädter, facing constant threat of deportation as a Jew, fled Berlin in early December 1938 – returning 65 years later as the world-famous photographer Helmut Newton. Since then, the Helmut Newton Foundation and the Berlin Art Library have jointly resided in the historic building now known as the Museum of Photography. Following the death of June Newton (also known as Alice Springs) in April 2021, the entire collection of works by Helmut Newton and Alice Springs, along with all archival materials, have been housed in the foundation’s archive. This unified collection serves as an invaluable resource for the foundation’s solo and group exhibitions. For the Berlin, Berlin exhibition, this comprehensive archive enabled the curation and reproduction of numerous Newton images that had never been showcased previously.

At the age of 16, Helmut Newton began his photographic training under the legendary photographer Yva in Berlin-Charlottenburg from 1936 to 1938. Following in her footsteps, he went on to carve his path in the three genres of fashion, portraits and nudes. His early self-portraits, produced in Yva’s studio in 1936, not only mark the beginning of his career as a photographer but also the start of this exhibition. After stints in Singapore and Melbourne, where Newton opened a photo studio in 1945, his career took off in Paris in the early 1960s. During this time, 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 the Brandenburg Gate before the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. We also see his 1963 fashion series, Mata Hari Spy Story, featuring Brigitte Schilling near the newly-erected Berlin Wall, which sparked controversy for blending a politically charged setting with fashion. As a result, Newton was shunned in Berlin for years. These early Berlin fashion photographs remained virtually unknown. In 1977, Newton revisited Berlin, capturing nude shots of models like Jenny Capitain in diverse locales, including boarding houses seemingly untouched by time and the legendary artists’ haunt, restaurant Exil. In 1979, the newly relaunched German Vogue commissioned Newton to retrace his childhood and youth in West Berlin, visualising 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), Max (1997) and the Süddeutsche Zeitung magazine (2001). During the 1980s and ‘90s, he also photographed numerous portraits, including of Hanna Schygulla, David Bowie and Wim Wenders. Additionally, he documented architectural highlights like the wrapping of the Reichstag by Christo and Jeanne-Claude in 1995 and explored the landscapes bordering the city. Newton selected some of these Berlin photographs for exhibitions, including a retrospective at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie for his 80th birthday in autumn 2000, and a year later for Sex & Landscapes at his former gallery in Zürich, de Pury & Luxembourg.