Berlin, Berlin: the 20-year anniversary of the Helmut Newton Foundation.

In the autumn of 2003, Helmut Newton established his foundation in Berlin in order to house parts of his archive. He opened the building to the public in June 2004 at the historic Landwehrkasino next to Zoologischer Garten station. It was from this exact station, in early December 1938, that Helmut Neustädter who faced the constant threat of deportation as a Jew, fled Berlin. 65 years later, he then returned to the city as the world-famous photographer – Helmut Newton. Since 2004, the Helmut Newton Foundation and the Berlin Art Library have jointly resided in the historic building now known as the Museum of Photography. After the death of his beloved wife, June Newton (also known as Alice Springs) in April 2021, both of their collections of works and archival materials have been housed here, in the foundation’s archive.

Helmut Newton trained under the legendary photographer Yva in Berlin-Charlottenburg from 1936 to 1938, following in her footsteps and carving out his career in fashion, portraits, and nudes. After stints in Singapore and Melbourne, Newton arrived Paris in the early 1960s where his career really took off. Throughout this period he frequently returned to Berlin for fashion shoots in magazines like Constanze, Adam, and Vogue Europe.

In this exhibition, we see photographs of Newton’s models posing at Brandenburg Gate before the 1961 construction of the Berlin Wall and 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 of this project was a multi-page portfolio titled Berlin, Berlin! – which inspired the name of the 20th anniversary exhibition.

The other exhibition rooms recontextualize Newton’s most iconic and lesser-known images of Berlin ranging from the 1930s to the 2000s. With a variety of photos, including vintage fashion prints by Yva to Barbara Klemm’s political photojournalism. These images span the Roaring Twenties into which Newton was born, the devastation of World War II, postwar reconstruction and the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall into the early 21st century.

These pieces on show include Yevgeny Chaldei, a Russian-Ukrainian photographer, who immortalized the ground battle around the Reichstag during the final weeks of World War II in the spring of 1945. Opting for a birds eye view, Hein Gorny flew over the city the following autumn with Adolph C. Byers, to document Berlin’s postwar devastation through striking aerial photographs. In the late 1950s, the precarious situation in the city slowly stabilized. Photographers such as Arno Fischer, Will McBride, and F.C. Gundlach, captured this whilst movement between the East and West of the city was still possible. However, the erection of the Berlin Wall in August 1961 drastically altered the city’s dynamics once again. 1966 brought a new wave of unrest throughout Berlin with the student protest movement in West Berlin, captured by photographers like Günter Zint. Meanwhile, an archival work by Arwed Messmer creatively compiles historical photographs from the West Berlin police taken during this same politically charged period. Messmer also brings new life to photographs taken by Fritz Tiedemann, who had been tasked by East Berlin authorities in 1949 to systematically document the city, some of which still lay in ruins from the war. Tiedemann created panoramas of buildings, squares, and streets by assembling contact prints onto cardboard. Recognizing the value of this unique urban record, Messmer revisited this work, digitally reconstructing and enlarging the panoramas, and producing massive prints for the Berlinische Galerie. Through Messmer’s discovery, we can experience this historical Berlin and the emptiness that echoed around the city in the early 1950.

The Berlin Wall emerges as a recurring motif throughout the exhibition. Appearing in photographs captured by East German border guards, curated and annotated by Arwed Messmer and Annett Gröschner, they offer a detailed look at the Wall in the mid-1960s. Resurfacing in the background of other images across the exhibit, it reflects the divided city beyond famous sites like the Brandenburg Gate or the Reichstag and collectively captures the mythos of Berlin and its representation. The exhibition fosters an engaging dialogue between influential projects that shaped photographic and film history. For example Maria Sewcz’s series inter esse is juxtaposed with Michael Schmidt’s Waffenruhe and film stills from Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire. Notably, these works all originate from the late 1980s, prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The exhibition’s final chapter revolves around the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification, featuring photographs capturing these events and their aftermath. This period is represented by Ulrich Wüst’s leporellos, Thomas Florschuetz and Harf Zimmermann, including shots displaying the interiors of the former Palace of the Republic and intriguing new perspectives of the Berlin TV Tower on Alexanderplatz. They are visual testaments to a city fated “to always become and never be” (Karl Scheffler).

Newton’s own portrayal of his hometown, presented through approximately 100 photographs, is complemented, interpreted, and echoed by an equally extensive array of images spanning across the decades from fellow photographers and filmmakers. The juxtaposition of these photographs reflects the curatorial approach adopted by the Helmut Newton Foundation for the 2022 group show Hollywood  – another mythical location pivotal to Newton’s visual legacy.

Alongside the main exhibition, in the project room on the ground floor of Foundation, run complementary presentations to accompany the exhibits on the second floor. Here you can find a variety of Berlin’s photographers whose works could have been included in the anniversary exhibition Berlin, Berlin!. In this separate space, sourced from private collections, we are able to explore the works of artists including: Wilfried Bauer, Viktoria Binschtok, Janos Frecot, Karl-Ludwig Lange, Anna Lehmann-Brauns and Hans W. Mende among others. This parallel exhibition expands upon the main exhibition’s themes, showcasing a range of photographic approaches from journalistic to conceptually artistic.

During the run of Berlin, Berlin!, a publication of the same name will be released by TASCHEN, which will feature Helmut Newton’s Berlin images.

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