It is with great sadness that we announce the death of June Newton, aka photographer Alice Springs, in Monte Carlo on 9th April. June Newton’s storied career as a photographer started in the 1970s.
Born June Browne in Melbourne in 1923, June worked as an actor in the theatre. She met Helmut Newton in 1947, a German-Jewish refugee who in 1938 fled Nazi Germany and who was starting out his career in his studio and at Australian Vogue. The couple moved to Europe in 1956 after Helmut was offered a job at British Vogue; June found work as an actor in various live TV productions, BBC radio and the theatre. Briefly returning to Australia, June and Helmut settled in Paris, which they would call home for the next two decades.
It was here that June’s acting career in front of the camera was superseded by a new one the other side of the lens. June’s first photographs were taken while covering an assignment for Helmut who was too ill to attend. He taught her the basics, she took the photographs, the client liked them — and a career was born.
Named after the town in the centre of Australia after Jean Seberg’s boyfriend Ricardo asked her to blindly put a pin in a map of the country, Alice Springs moved away from commercial and fashion photography into portraits, for which she was most celebrated. Her disarmingly honest portraits of the creative beau monde offered a glimpse into their world.
By the time of their move to Monte Carlo in 1981, the Newtons had cemented their reputations as photographers. Her photographs have been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, and the Helmut Newton Foundation, Berlin.
June and Helmut’s mutual love and encouragement can be seen in their creative output, with Helmut crediting June’s encouragement to propel him towards pushing boundaries of photography, storytelling and taste. She acted as his confidante, his editor and art directed most of his books. In 1994, she directed and filmed Helmut by June, an intimate portrait of life with her husband and testament to their close personal and creative relationship. Together they produced Us and Them, a book featuring side-by-side portraits of the same subjects, one shot by Alice, one shot by Helmut — their approach and their results are wildly different.
In 2003 June and Helmut were invited by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation to establish the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin. This opened in June 2004, six months after Helmut’s death in January that year from a heart attack in Los Angeles. Helmut and June had been married for 56 years. June’s work is part of the permanent collection there; June’s Room shows the work of photographers that June supported, and the Foundation continues to celebrate the creative output of June and Helmut as well as the art of photography today. In 2012, June Newton was honoured as an Officier des Arts, Lettres et Sciences in Paris, and she remained active as a director of the HNF, initiating the ideas behind the biannual exhibitions for over a decade and a half.
