The photographer who took soul-stealing shots
June Newton 1923–2021
June Newton’s photography career was launched by a case of the flu. It was 1970 in Paris, and her husband, the high-fashion photographer Helmut Newton, was too ill to attend a shoot for Gitanes cigarettes. So on a whim the former actress took a quick tutorial in how to handle a camera and went in his place. “The pictures weren’t bad,” she said. “They were sent off to the client in London, and the check came back addressed to Helmut Newton. I was in business.” While Helmut was known as the King of Kink for his sexually explicit and often brutal images, June—who worked under the name Alice Springs—specialized in intimate portraits of celebrity subjects. Charlotte Rampling stares the viewer down in a 1982 photo; in a 1978 shot, an imperious Yves Saint Laurent clutches his chihuahua, Hazel. “I used all the acting skills I had,” said Newton, “to make people relax, dwell within themselves, and just look at me.”
Born June Browne, she had an “eccentric” childhood on a farm outside Melbourne, said The Guardian (U.K.). Her mother once dealt with a den of snakes by playing a harmonica to lure them to a bowl of milk; a family friend known as Aunt Allie then beat them to death. June trained as an actor, and was performing in Melbourne when “she responded to an ad for models for a new, smart studio.” It was run by Helmut Newton, a German
Jew who’d fled the Nazis to Singapore, then Australia. “They married within a year,” relocating to London in 1957 and then Paris. June “quit acting and turned to painting while her husband’s star began to rise,” said Vanity Fair. After taking up photography— choosing her nom de guerre by sticking a pin in a map of Australia—she, too, became a sought-after hire for magazines and commercial clients.
Newton “balanced two jobs for the rest of her life,” said The Times (U.K.), as a photographer and as Helmut’s “art director, curator, protector, and promoter.” The pair, who later lived in Monte Carlo and spent winters at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, often photographed each other, and gathered these and other images in a 1998 book, Us and Them. Helmut “wasn’t interested in people,” she said of their contrasting styles. “‘I’m not interested in soul,’ he said. But I was, and I tried to steal them. And in many cases I did.”