1/23/2024 0 Comments Photographers like helmut newton![]() Only a few years later, this music- and fashion-based protest movement in California subsided what remains is this artistic inventory of the spirit of the times. Anarchic youth culture, marked by radical hairstyles and shrill body piercings, rejected the notion of capitalist society. ![]() These powerful images in both black & white and colour are complemented by an extensive street photography series that Alice Springs shot along Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, where she attentively documented California’s punk and hip-hop scenes during the 1980s. The wordless dialogue that leads to such extraordinary portraits seems to stem from a kind of spiritual kinship that she shares with her subjects. ![]() In her many portraits of fellow photographers, such as Richard Avedon, Brassaï, Ralph Gibson, and of course Helmut Newton, and of celebrities including Nicole Kidman, Audrey Hepburn, Christopher Lambert, and Claude Chabrol, Alice Springs succeeds in capturing both their outer appearance and their aura. Now in the summer of 2016, a second, somewhat smaller retrospective, organized in 2015 by the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) in Paris, will be shown in Berlin and again accompanied by a book by TASCHEN publishers. Alice Springs and Helmut Newton often exhibited their works together, especially their joint project “Us and Them.” In 2010, the first Alice Springs retrospective was hosted at the Helmut Newton Foundation. Still he chafed at British Vogue’s primness, the “best” ones remaining unpublished and the story given the minimum number of pages.The MEP Show Under the pseudonym Alice Springs, June Newton, widow of the legendary photographer, has worked since 1970 as a photographer, primarily in the field of portraiture. Other odd happenings included a session with Twiggy from 1967, model of the moment, throwing a cat in the air (cue more cancelled subscriptions) and an African safari, culminating in the big game – model Jill Kennington – trussed up in a net on the bonnet of a Land Rover. As she recalled it, “Around Helmut, I’ve always thought it was important to dress appropriately, which, during this particular shoot on a sweltering day in the south of France, meant a black bikini, sunglasses and a pair of my favourite Saint Laurent heels… Next thing I knew he had persuaded me to spend the rest of the night floating in the pool.” Surely Cecil Beaton, a Vogue star during the era when Newton was starting out in Berlin, had this shoot in mind when he wrote, admiringly, of Newton’s “odd happenings around swimming pools at night”. In the pool itself, Vogue fashion editor Grace Coddington clung to the side. Among the guests: model Karin Feddersen in a scarlet pleated chiffon dress by Nettie Vogues future Bond girl and actress Barbara Carrera in a floral Dior evening dress and Uva Barden in black tie. Here a poolside jet-set cocktail party, albeit an exclusive one, was in full swing. Taken at the Hotel Byblos, St Tropez, it chimed with Newton’s observation, “Although it makes my life more complicated, I prefer to take my camera into public and private places, places often inaccessible to anyone but the rich.” “Limelight Nights” was published in 1973. And it was for the British edition that he made one of his most memorable pool pictures. ![]() “My passion for swimming pools just will not stop,” he told Vogue in 1976. There is nothing I can do to make her lifelike. Whichever way I turn her, she’s got a dumb look in her eyes. ![]() There is another one I call ‘Le Con’, which means idiot. There is one that’s really sexy with a submissive look in her eyes. This is from World Without Men (1984): “It’s fascinating to play with these mannequins,” he writes. Of the sexual connotations – and possibilities – of these lifelike “dolls”, he was hardly oblivious. And it was at British Vogue that he began to explore the potential of shooting fashion on shop window mannequins, tricking the eye by making them as believably human as possible. ![]()
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