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Do not change anything else: The photographer June Newton was 97 years old
Photo: Adam Berry / Getty Images
Yes, she was also the wife, muse and manager of photo legend Helmut Newton.
Under the stage name Alice Springs, June Newton made her own career as a photographer and portraitist of the great and beautiful of this world.
At the age of 97, the native Australian died on Friday in her adopted home of Monte Carlo.
"We mourn the loss of an outstanding personality and an internationally recognized photographer," said the message from the Helmut Newton Foundation, of which she was president.
In this role she made the Museum of Photography in Berlin a “unique place for photography”.
"We will miss them very much."
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June Newton 1962 - Photographed by her husband Helmut.
Photo: Stephanie Pilick / picture alliance / dpa
At the age of 24, when she was still June Browne and a successful actress, she met a young photographer in Melbourne, the city of her birth, who had fled Germany from the Nazis.
The couple married a year later and stayed together for almost 60 years.
In 2004 Helmut Newton died at the age of 83 after a traffic accident with his Cadillac in Los Angeles.
She did not start her own photo work until 1970. You now lived in Paris, Helmut Newton had the flu.
For the upcoming advertising order from a French cigarette company, she had the camera and settings explained to her - and started instead.
According to her own account, she found her stage name Alice Springs by dropping a pin on an Australian map with her eyes closed.
Her husband would have preferred that she work under a pseudonym, she said.
Nevertheless, she later called her memoirs »Mrs.
Newton".
The list of her artistic portraits reads like a who's who of the international cultural scene through the decades - from Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld to Billy Wilder, Catherine Deneuve and Nicole Kidman to Madonna and the Hells Angels.
In 1978 she had her first solo exhibition in Amsterdam, followed by her first photo book in 1983.
In addition, she regularly accompanied her husband's work with the camera and looked after his books and catalogs as artistic director.
While Helmut Newton often staged his photos dramatically, she relied on direct access to her characters.
"In each case, I tried not to change anything about the person I was speaking to and to distract their minds from the fact that they were in front of the camera," she said in 2010.
After her husband's death in 2004, she set up a foundation named after him in Berlin.
To mark its tenth anniversary, the widow once again showed the legendary exhibition "Us and Them", which was also published as an illustrated book in 1998 under this title.
In it, the couple documents their private and professional coexistence with unprecedented openness.
She was once asked why there are so few women in commercial photography.
"Yes, there were and are very few women in this business," she replies.
"But most of them were damn good."
kae / dpa
