Intermezzo: Revisiting Helmut Newton

After more than 20 years of successful mediation in the permanent exhibition “Helmut Newton's Private Property” on the ground floor of the Museum of Photography, we have decided to expand the exhibition concept and radically change the previous presentation. The basic idea of providing information about the life of Helmut Newton and his wife June in this room remains unchanged. The temporary exhibitions on the first floor will also continue to contextualize the work of Helmut Newton and Alice Springs twice a year, sometimes as solo exhibitions, sometimes as group exhibitions.

The intermediate step in the transformation of the previous permanent exhibition offers a cinematic “intermezzo” with Helmut Newton in an overwhelming film room. On the ground floor, eight video projectors project a film onto four screens. The film is based in part on the film portrait created three years ago for a major Newton exhibition in A Coruña, produced by Profirst International in collaboration with the Martin Salvador Studio for the MOP Foundation there. It is supplemented by previously unseen footage. Various sources were used for this, including material from June Newton, which was recently processed and digitized in the museum's own archive. For the first time, visitors in Berlin can now also see interviews with a dozen contemporary witnesses, including Philippe Garner, Carla Sozzani, Jenny Capitain, Violetta Sanchez, and Matthias Harder.

At the rear of the exhibition space on the ground floor of the museum, nearly 100 exhibition posters by Newton continue to hang, albeit in a modified setting and supplemented by several posters from various Alice Springs solo exhibitions. In the 16-meter-long display case beneath the posters, the vintage magazines featuring Newton's published work have been replaced for the new temporary presentation “Intermezzo” by other fashion and lifestyle magazines and combined with magazine editorials by Alice Springs, including magazines such as Jardin des Modes, Elle, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Égoïste, Stern, The New Yorker, Photo, and Paris Match. So at this point, the exhibition display remains the same, only the content changes. Slowly walking past the wall display continues to reveal an intense insight into the development of fashion photography and the changing image of women in the Western world from the late 1950s to the beginning of the 21st century, including the revolutionary social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s and their visual impact – right down to fashion, which, as we know, reflects the spirit of the times.

Next to it, in the corridors of “Intermezzo,” large text panels with illustrated biographies of the life and work of Helmut and June Newton are presented, along with framed portrait photographs of the two founders of the foundation. And opposite the huge poster wall, a new curatorial idea begins, which is later repeated at irregular intervals under the motto “Spotlight: Behind the Frame”: An iconic photograph from the work of Helmut Newton or Alice Springs is brought into focus by illuminating its history of creation and distribution using contact sheets from the shoot, publications of the specific image, notes, preparatory Polaroids, and comparable photographs. It begins with “Rue Aubriot,” Newton's legendary fashion photograph from Paris, taken on the eponymous street for French Vogue in 1975, as well as the first photograph in Alice Springs' oeuvre: the smoking male model, an advertising image for Gitanes cigarettes, also taken in Paris in 1970. This miniature exhibition concept will later be continued by guest curators, providing an external, fresh perspective on the work of Helmut Newton and Alice Springs. In this way, the foundation and its archives will literally be opened up for a new encounter.