Helmut Newton

Helmut Newton left Berlin as a teenager and came back, more than sixty years later, as one of the most famous photographers in the world. His fashion pictures for Vogue, his towering Big Nudes and his cool, cinematic portraits changed the way magazines looked, and his own foundation now fills a grand building beside Zoo station.

A Berlin childhood

He was born Helmut Neustädter in Berlin on 31 October 1920, into a Jewish family; his father owned a button factory, and a plaque marks his birthplace in Schöneberg. He went to school in the city and from 1936 worked for the Berlin photographer Yva, Elsie Neuländer Simon.

On 5 December 1938 he left Germany, sailing from Trieste on the Conte Rosso. He worked briefly as a photographer in Singapore and reached Australia in 1940, served in the Australian Army from 1942, became a British subject in 1945 and took the name Newton in 1946.

Melbourne, Paris and Vogue

In 1946 he opened a studio in Flinders Lane, Melbourne, and in 1948 married the actress June Browne, who later became a fine photographer herself under the name Alice Springs. An Australian Vogue commission in 1956 led to a contract with British Vogue, and in 1961 the couple settled in Paris.

There his pictures for French Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar made his name: stylised, provocative and unmistakably his. The New York Times called him a prolific and widely imitated fashion photographer.

Big Nudes and SUMO

In 1980 he began the studio series published as Big Nudes in 1981: nudes photographed in the studio with the scale and presence of sculpture. Domestic Nudes and Naked and Dressed followed, and in 1999 Taschen published SUMO, his giant book.

Not a “dead museum”, but a “living institution”. Helmut Newton’s wish for his foundation in Berlin

Home to Berlin

In October 2003, a few months before his death, Newton set up the Helmut Newton Foundation to preserve and present his own photographs and those of June Newton. He gave it numerous original prints, and wished that it should not be a dead museum but a living institution.

The foundation opened in June 2004 in the Museum für Fotografie at Jebensstraße 2, a former officers’ casino beside Zoologischer Garten station, with the ground and first floors for its exhibitions. Newton did not live to see it: he died in Los Angeles on 23 January 2004.

His ashes are buried at the Städtischer Friedhof III in Friedenau, in a grave he now shares with June Newton, Alice Springs, and the city of Berlin honours it as an honorary grave.

Seeing the work

The foundation, now known as the Newton Foundation, changes its exhibitions through the year, drawing on Helmut and June Newton’s archives and showing other photographers alongside. Its 2026 programme ran Rooms / Stages and Helmut Newton’s One-off Album until 15 November, with a show of his early books opening on 2 December.

Our advice: take the train to Zoologischer Garten and give the Newton Foundation a long afternoon, then climb to the Museum für Fotografie’s own collection on the second floor. Check the foundation’s programme before you go, as exhibitions change.