6 minute read
INTERVIEW
PHOTO
– BOOKS – EXHIBITIONS – FESTIVALS – AWARDS –
INTERVIEW
Shortly before his death, Helmut Newton and his wife June established a foundation to care for and represent his estate. Dr. Matthias Harder, the foundation’s Curator and Director, speaks about Newton’s photographic legacy and future exhibitions.
LFI: What would you say is Helmut Newton’s greatest legacy? MATTHIAS HARDER: He showed us that virtually anything is possible if you really want to live your dreams. Newton left his home town of Berlin in 1938, fleeing from the Nazis. He was only carrying one suitcase, and was completely on his own; but he went on to become one of the best known and best paid photographers in the world.
LFI: Helmut Newton called himself once a “professional voyeur”. How would you describe him? HARDER: That describes Newton very well. From my perspective he is, furthermore, a great, visual seducer. His fashion pictures – which, in fact, make up the bulk of his work – are extremely ingenious and excitingly staged, mostly both elegant and provocative. Newton shaped the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, and was often even one step ahead of it.
LFI: Helmut Newton would have been 100 years old in 2020. How will you you be celebrating? HARDER: The great retrospective that I had been preparing for months on the occasion of his centenary, had to be postponed till the summer of 2021, for reasons we are all well aware of. As an alternative there will be a great outdoor exhibition on a 85m-long wall on Köpenicker Straße in BerlinKreuzberg, accompanied by 250 large advertising spaces in the most diverse places all over Berlin.
LFI: Newton himself established the Helmut Newton Foundation just a few weeks before he passed away on January 23, 2004. What is it that makes the foundation’s archives so special? HARDER: The Newton archives are practically complete; the foundation has a few thousand prints and hundreds of thousands of negatives. After presenting a first collection of →
Above: Helmut Newton, Rue Aubriot, French Vogue, Paris 1975; left: Helmut Newton, Untitled (Chicken), French Vogue, Paris 1994; left page: Helmut Newton, Mario Valentino, Monte Carlo 1998
Above: Evelyn Hofer, Policeman, 59th St., New York 1964; left: Helmut Newton, Madonna, Vanity Fair, 1990; below: Helmut Newton, Elizabeth Taylor, Los Angeles 1985
From the top: Sheila Metzner, Rebecca, Diamond Necklace, 1984; Helmut Newton, Elle, Paris 1969; Joel Meyerowitz, Darrell, Provincetown 1983
original images on the occasion of the foundation’s establishment, there were successive, complete exhibitions produced while he was still alive, then later all the Polaroids, work prints, contact sheets, negatives and slides brought from Monte Carlo. Furthermore, the archives include thousands of publications where photo series by Newton appeared – mostly fashion and lifestyle magazines. We are, the competency centre for Newton’s oeuvre, so to speak. In addition, we have generously-sized gallery spaces for our alternating exhibitions. This makes the foundation quite a unique institution in the world.
LFI: Following Newton’s wishes, the foundation was not to be a “dead museum”. How can you achieve this? HARDER: Newton had jotted down his wishes on a piece of paper, namely that his foundation should offer a platform to other photographers. Initially it was June Newton who selected the other photographers, but now it’s I who invite them to our group exhibitions. LFI: The current exhibition on display is America 1970s/80s: Hofer, Metzner, Meyerowitz, Newton, which also includes the fashion and nudes pictures Newton took in the USA in the 1970s. How did you design the exhibition? HARDER: Newton and his work are always the starting point for any group exhibition. In this case I focussed on his early days in the USA when he worked, for example, for Alexander Liberman at US Vogue, or later for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. The pictures are indeed different from those taken in Paris at the same time. LFI: What relationship did the other photographers featured in the America 1970s/80s exhibition have with Newton? HARDER: Sheila Metzner was a close friend of the Newtons; there are wonderful portraits they took of each other, that we’re exhibiting here for the first time. Their imagery may be very different, but interestingly enough they worked in the same genres. In turn, Joel Meyerowitz portrayed Sheila in Provincetown, and this series of pictures, that the photographer recently rediscovered in his archives and that we’re presenting for the first time, is, at a first glance, spectacular and modern – we see an incredibly liberal America, without racial or gender exclusion. In turn, the early, colour pictures of New York by Evelyn Hofer, who like Newton had to leave Germany as a young photographer, reveal that she was a real pioneer of poetic street photography. I think that the four very diverse positions come together to create a surprising and exciting narrative. LFI: A permanent Newton exhibition is always on display at the Helmut Newton Foundation. What is the common thread? How are you able to rearrange his work time and again? HARDER: The permanent exhibition on the ground floor continues to be well attended. Most visitors come a number of times, when, for example, the come back from abroad, and they want to see a new special exhibition on the first floor. Consequently Private Property often ends up being the final stage of a comprehensive visit to the museum. From time to time, I might complement it with an object in a showcase, or change the motifs in the vintage magazines, calendars or Newton press clippings books on display. After the retrospective, however, we will also completely re-plan it.
LFI: How is Newton’s relationship to the work of his wife June (published under the name Alice Springs) established? How do you create a context for both photographers’ oeuvres? HARDER: With their joint exhibition, Us and Them, at the end of the nineties, they started something very novel as an artist couple, with self-portraits, portraits of each other, and portraits of famous friends and other companions along the way. We put this great project on display on the occasion of the inauguration of the museum in 2004, and repeated it in a new format ten years later. Some of its essence may
well find its way into the new permanent exhibition being prepared. We have also exhibited two retrospectives of her work in the gallery space on the first floor, and, of course, I’m planning something new for June Newton 2023, in celebration of her 100th birthday.
INTERVIEW: Carla Susanne Erdmann
DR. MATTHIAS HARDER was born in Kiel in 1965. He studied History of Art, Classical Archaeology and Philosophy in Kiel and Berlin. He is a member of the German Photography Society and member of the Board of the European Month of Photography. He has been working as Head Curator at the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin, since its establishment in 2004. He has been the Director of the institution since 2019.
OUTDOOR EXHIBITION Helmut Newton One Hundred, until November 8, 2020; Kraftwerk Berlin, Köpenicker Straße 70 EXHIBITION America 1970s/80s: Evelyn Hofer, Sheila Metzner, Joel Meyerowitz, Helmut Newton, until May 16, 2021; Helmut Newton Foundation; www.helmutnewton.com
