Mirror, mirror on the wall –how am I doing as night-time falls?
There she is once again, posing before the mirror with her small camera in her right hand. It is as if not even a year has passed since 1981, when Helmut shot a portrait of hers in Monte Carlo. Her hands crossed, her body firm, and as always this very same determined gaze, bursting into an unspoken stream of creative strength and experiences.
“Alice Springs” was born at one dinner party with friends when Helmut made it clear that if there were to be one photographer called Newton in the family, this would be him. A name chosen blindfolded, with a pin and a map of Australia became from then onwards the photographic pseudonym of the “King of Kink’s” lifelong partner and creative confidante. This was not Mrs. Newton’s first artistic nickname. Another one had been born out of a different necessity during an audition back in the forties, when June Browne became the actress “June Brunell”. This second time, thirty years later, was for the actress and now painter June to establish herself as an important photographer in her own right. In the years to come she would be assigned commercial commissions for Vogue, Marie Claire and Vanity, while in 1976 she would make her artistic breakthrough dedicating her work to portraits of famous eccentrics, such as William Burroughs, Roy Lichtenstein, Christopher Isherwood and Robert Mapplethorpe. June’s pictures recovered the intimacy and the soul that Helmut’s edgy fashion pin-ups lacked. “I can see the truth and simplicity in the portraits of Alice Springs”, admitted Helmut in the introduction of their common book “Us and Them” in 1997. From her own part, she has always remained unpretentious. “I have no technique –I wing it and sometimes, I get lucky”. But we owe some of the most intimate and truthful portraits of Newton to her. Astoundingly straightforward and insightful at the same time, her lens has penetrated with a breathtaking sincerity the surface showing the man behind him, in the same unmediated way it illustrated the broken humanity of William Burroughs and the fragile woman beneath the actress Charlotte Rambling.
Mrs. Newton’s life is full of many befores and many afters. “There was a glorious middle, but now I’m living my ‘after Helmut’ life. It isn’t easy but I am energetic, have recovered from back surgery, which was performed a few weeks ago, and the creative juices are still flowing”, she comments, quoting Tennessee Williams, “En avant!” She has been a bit of everything; painter, actress, art director, photographer, film-maker, Helmut’s books’ editor, art director and curator for more than three decades, and the moving force behind the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin. “So, I guess”, she laughs, “the old saying “Jack of all trades, master of none”, fits me to a nutshell. Helmut once lovingly said to me, “You’re a jack of all trades, Junie”, kindly omitting the rest of the old saying”.
June has always been faithful to her motto, “Where there’s a will, there’s another way”. Almost four years after Helmut’s death, her life is full of plans for future projects: publishing her complete diaries; some kind of publication of postcards from Helmut sent before the fax was invented; the new exhibition in the Helmut Newton Foundation; and the come back of Alice Springs, who this time turns her camera on herself. “Eyemazing” features a series of self-portraits transmitting a hard to define immediacy and frankness. Beyond posing, beyond exposing one’s semi-nude body with the marks of surgery, beyond any conventional notion of age beauty, these intimate reflections express an awareness beyond time, the awareness of a female soul and of an ever evolving and expanding female artist.
Natasha Christia: How were these self-portraits born?
Alice Springs.: They were never meant to be a project, just a series of reflections of what I saw on the way to bed after dinner at the Chateau Marmont early this year. I never know when I’m going to photograph myself. It mostly happens when I’m cleaning my teeth or taking make-up off my face in front of the mirror before going to bed, or after surgery. In a detail from a print, I am wearing a necklace of a tube of my blood taken on the night following a face-lift. What I regret not having photographed is myself in the bathtub when the water turned bright red. I called for the nurse I’d hired for the night. “I’m haemorrhaging”, I cried. She raced in and said, “No! No! No! It’s just the blood coming from your hair, Madame.”
N.C.: How did your encounter with photography occur?
A.S.: I began to paint when one year Helmut gave me some canvases and a box of paints and brushes for Christmas. I bought books on how to paint from the local department store and boredom was relieved as I filled the canvases until the day when Helmut was unable to leave his bed because of a heavy cold. Someone had to notify the boy model booked for a cigarette advertisement on the Place Vendôme. I had already been working behind the scenes with Helmut for many years. So, I asked him to show me how to read the light meter and how to load the camera and went off and did the job. The model was most cooperative and it was when the cheque arrived in Helmut’s name from the English client that I knew I was in business.
N.C.: What equipment do you usually work with?
A.S.: I usually work with 35 mm cameras and a 50 mm lens “Shoemaker stick to your last”. Digital cameras don’t appeal to me.
N.C.: Why this special preference of yours to portrait photography?
A.S.: The focus on portraits was Helmut’s idea. I’d been working steadily on fashion and publicity assignments, always using the time in between waiting for the hairdresser and make-up experts to finish their work so as for me to take a few shots of the people involved on the shoot. One day Helmut said that these pictures were more interesting than the work I was doing. “But they’ll all end up in a drawer”, I said. However, I got the message and I also got lucky when the magazines Egoiste and Energumène asked me to take some portraits for them. I love taking portraits. I’ve photographed all my friends, their kids, doctors and nurses and I always give them prints.
N.C.: “But, you must have shot other subjects...!
A.S.: Of course! I have taken pictures of flowers that friends have sent and the changing landscape below the terrace of my apartment on the 19th floor. I have pictures of a beautiful pond that existed, before earth-moving equipment filled it in to make space for a great big hotel, which I have also photographed in all its stages of construction. I have a picture of two ducks sitting in it when it was reduced to a tiny puddle. The following morning Helmut called out to me, “Come, Junie, come, come, bring your camera”. The landfill had been completed. The ducks were gone.
N.C.: How difficult was to gain respect for your personal work as a photographer, as a woman and as the partner of a man established in his field?
A. S.: To quote William Shakespeare “To thine own self be true”. We did our own thing. As far as gaining respect as a photographer goes, well, I must be doing something right, otherwise I would not have been invited to contribute to your excellent magazine if I was just Helmut’s wife . My first editorial fashion series was for Dépêche Mode. They wanted Helmut, but he was under contract with Condé Nast. He suggested that they try me and they did with the proviso that they could kill the pictures. They gave me a chance and it worked. You can get one foot in the door as the wife of Helmut, but it can close as quickly as it opens if you can’t deliver the goods.
N.C: You have edited the finest books on Helmut Newton. What do you consider as the elements for a good photography publication?
A.S.: An understanding of the work and good material.
N.C. You have also worked with film-making. In this case too, your projects are visual diaries and portraits. Could you tell us a few words about them?
A.S.: I took Helmut to a camera store in 1994 to buy him a present for Christmas. The salesman presented us with one of the first video cameras. Helmut took one look at it and said, “I’m a photographer, Junie, not a movie man”. So, I bought it for myself and I knew exactly what to do with it – film Helmut at work. I didn’t know the front-end from the back-end of the camera, but I read the instructions carefully and I did a pretty good job, especially as stabilizers had not been installed in the early cameras, which is why the film jumps around a bit. But it reveals the man as much as the photographer. Unlike the special occasions when TV crews would arrive on the set and everyone was aware that they were being filmed, no one took any notice of me. I was part of the team.
N.C. Your life has many “befores” and many “afters”. You have been an actress, a painter, a photographer, a film-maker and an editor. What has been the source of all this creative energy?
A.S.: The source of my creative energy has been Helmut. And this is how it happened: I was in a play, and he had come to see me, and I was acting – we were all playing up – but he took it seriously and made me aware of my responsibility and from then on there was always someone in the dark audience who I had to play for.
N.C.: What has been the best moment in your life?
A. S.: It was when Helmut came through the door of his studio in Melbourne in 1947. I’d been sitting in his tiny little office admiring the photographs on the walls, the like of which I’d never seen before, and suddenly he threw the door open and said, “Come in”.
N.C.: What has photography contributed to your life?
A. S.: Photography is time remembered friends, past and present. Brassai comes to my mind: We had visited him and his wife in Beaulieu-sur-Mer – and we took him to the beach and he fled across the sand and dived into the sea. Helmut raced after him and fished him out. All during this time I had my camera at the ready – as Brassai stepped under the shower, the last words I ever heard from him were, “It was worth it”! I’d already obeyed Gilberte’s instructions “Don’t you dare take photographs!” I should not have listened to her. I should have learnt a lesson from Lartigue when he was sitting on a yacht and I disturbed his reverie to ask if I could take a picture of him. “Never ever ask”, he said, “Take the picture”. Relaxing in the backroom of a restaurant one summer’s day, I once again asked Lartigue if I could photograph him. “Go ahead”, he said, “There is no light”. Another monstre sacré was Joseph Losey. When I asked him to give me a few minutes in his courtyard one winter’s day in Paris, he was most obliging and as I shot away, he kept on repeating, “There’s not enough light, there’s not enough light!” But, I always think: If I can see them, so can my camera.
N.C.: What makes one a good photographer?
A. S.: What makes one a good carpenter, a good printer? What makes one a good surgeon? Many are called, few are chosen. A camera is always present, loaded, ready.
N.C.: Which one do you consider as being the best photograph you have ever taken?
A.S.: Graham Greene, simply because it was the only portrait of mine that Helmut was ever jealous of. But, the most beautiful portrait I’ve ever taken must be the one of Helmut on his deathbed. Who will take me on mine?
All images: Alice Springs
Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved
Published in Eyemazing. Issue 01-2008
There she is once again, posing before the mirror with her small camera in her right hand. It is as if not even a year has passed since 1981, when Helmut shot a portrait of hers in Monte Carlo. Her hands crossed, her body firm, and as always this very same determined gaze, bursting into an unspoken stream of creative strength and experiences.
“Alice Springs” was born at one dinner party with friends when Helmut made it clear that if there were to be one photographer called Newton in the family, this would be him. A name chosen blindfolded, with a pin and a map of Australia became from then onwards the photographic pseudonym of the “King of Kink’s” lifelong partner and creative confidante. This was not Mrs. Newton’s first artistic nickname. Another one had been born out of a different necessity during an audition back in the forties, when June Browne became the actress “June Brunell”. This second time, thirty years later, was for the actress and now painter June to establish herself as an important photographer in her own right. In the years to come she would be assigned commercial commissions for Vogue, Marie Claire and Vanity, while in 1976 she would make her artistic breakthrough dedicating her work to portraits of famous eccentrics, such as William Burroughs, Roy Lichtenstein, Christopher Isherwood and Robert Mapplethorpe. June’s pictures recovered the intimacy and the soul that Helmut’s edgy fashion pin-ups lacked. “I can see the truth and simplicity in the portraits of Alice Springs”, admitted Helmut in the introduction of their common book “Us and Them” in 1997. From her own part, she has always remained unpretentious. “I have no technique –I wing it and sometimes, I get lucky”. But we owe some of the most intimate and truthful portraits of Newton to her. Astoundingly straightforward and insightful at the same time, her lens has penetrated with a breathtaking sincerity the surface showing the man behind him, in the same unmediated way it illustrated the broken humanity of William Burroughs and the fragile woman beneath the actress Charlotte Rambling.
Mrs. Newton’s life is full of many befores and many afters. “There was a glorious middle, but now I’m living my ‘after Helmut’ life. It isn’t easy but I am energetic, have recovered from back surgery, which was performed a few weeks ago, and the creative juices are still flowing”, she comments, quoting Tennessee Williams, “En avant!” She has been a bit of everything; painter, actress, art director, photographer, film-maker, Helmut’s books’ editor, art director and curator for more than three decades, and the moving force behind the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin. “So, I guess”, she laughs, “the old saying “Jack of all trades, master of none”, fits me to a nutshell. Helmut once lovingly said to me, “You’re a jack of all trades, Junie”, kindly omitting the rest of the old saying”.
June has always been faithful to her motto, “Where there’s a will, there’s another way”. Almost four years after Helmut’s death, her life is full of plans for future projects: publishing her complete diaries; some kind of publication of postcards from Helmut sent before the fax was invented; the new exhibition in the Helmut Newton Foundation; and the come back of Alice Springs, who this time turns her camera on herself. “Eyemazing” features a series of self-portraits transmitting a hard to define immediacy and frankness. Beyond posing, beyond exposing one’s semi-nude body with the marks of surgery, beyond any conventional notion of age beauty, these intimate reflections express an awareness beyond time, the awareness of a female soul and of an ever evolving and expanding female artist.
Natasha Christia: How were these self-portraits born?
Alice Springs.: They were never meant to be a project, just a series of reflections of what I saw on the way to bed after dinner at the Chateau Marmont early this year. I never know when I’m going to photograph myself. It mostly happens when I’m cleaning my teeth or taking make-up off my face in front of the mirror before going to bed, or after surgery. In a detail from a print, I am wearing a necklace of a tube of my blood taken on the night following a face-lift. What I regret not having photographed is myself in the bathtub when the water turned bright red. I called for the nurse I’d hired for the night. “I’m haemorrhaging”, I cried. She raced in and said, “No! No! No! It’s just the blood coming from your hair, Madame.”
N.C.: How did your encounter with photography occur?
A.S.: I began to paint when one year Helmut gave me some canvases and a box of paints and brushes for Christmas. I bought books on how to paint from the local department store and boredom was relieved as I filled the canvases until the day when Helmut was unable to leave his bed because of a heavy cold. Someone had to notify the boy model booked for a cigarette advertisement on the Place Vendôme. I had already been working behind the scenes with Helmut for many years. So, I asked him to show me how to read the light meter and how to load the camera and went off and did the job. The model was most cooperative and it was when the cheque arrived in Helmut’s name from the English client that I knew I was in business.
N.C.: What equipment do you usually work with?
A.S.: I usually work with 35 mm cameras and a 50 mm lens “Shoemaker stick to your last”. Digital cameras don’t appeal to me.
N.C.: Why this special preference of yours to portrait photography?
A.S.: The focus on portraits was Helmut’s idea. I’d been working steadily on fashion and publicity assignments, always using the time in between waiting for the hairdresser and make-up experts to finish their work so as for me to take a few shots of the people involved on the shoot. One day Helmut said that these pictures were more interesting than the work I was doing. “But they’ll all end up in a drawer”, I said. However, I got the message and I also got lucky when the magazines Egoiste and Energumène asked me to take some portraits for them. I love taking portraits. I’ve photographed all my friends, their kids, doctors and nurses and I always give them prints.
N.C.: “But, you must have shot other subjects...!
A.S.: Of course! I have taken pictures of flowers that friends have sent and the changing landscape below the terrace of my apartment on the 19th floor. I have pictures of a beautiful pond that existed, before earth-moving equipment filled it in to make space for a great big hotel, which I have also photographed in all its stages of construction. I have a picture of two ducks sitting in it when it was reduced to a tiny puddle. The following morning Helmut called out to me, “Come, Junie, come, come, bring your camera”. The landfill had been completed. The ducks were gone.
N.C.: How difficult was to gain respect for your personal work as a photographer, as a woman and as the partner of a man established in his field?
A. S.: To quote William Shakespeare “To thine own self be true”. We did our own thing. As far as gaining respect as a photographer goes, well, I must be doing something right, otherwise I would not have been invited to contribute to your excellent magazine if I was just Helmut’s wife . My first editorial fashion series was for Dépêche Mode. They wanted Helmut, but he was under contract with Condé Nast. He suggested that they try me and they did with the proviso that they could kill the pictures. They gave me a chance and it worked. You can get one foot in the door as the wife of Helmut, but it can close as quickly as it opens if you can’t deliver the goods.
N.C: You have edited the finest books on Helmut Newton. What do you consider as the elements for a good photography publication?
A.S.: An understanding of the work and good material.
N.C. You have also worked with film-making. In this case too, your projects are visual diaries and portraits. Could you tell us a few words about them?
A.S.: I took Helmut to a camera store in 1994 to buy him a present for Christmas. The salesman presented us with one of the first video cameras. Helmut took one look at it and said, “I’m a photographer, Junie, not a movie man”. So, I bought it for myself and I knew exactly what to do with it – film Helmut at work. I didn’t know the front-end from the back-end of the camera, but I read the instructions carefully and I did a pretty good job, especially as stabilizers had not been installed in the early cameras, which is why the film jumps around a bit. But it reveals the man as much as the photographer. Unlike the special occasions when TV crews would arrive on the set and everyone was aware that they were being filmed, no one took any notice of me. I was part of the team.
N.C. Your life has many “befores” and many “afters”. You have been an actress, a painter, a photographer, a film-maker and an editor. What has been the source of all this creative energy?
A.S.: The source of my creative energy has been Helmut. And this is how it happened: I was in a play, and he had come to see me, and I was acting – we were all playing up – but he took it seriously and made me aware of my responsibility and from then on there was always someone in the dark audience who I had to play for.
N.C.: What has been the best moment in your life?
A. S.: It was when Helmut came through the door of his studio in Melbourne in 1947. I’d been sitting in his tiny little office admiring the photographs on the walls, the like of which I’d never seen before, and suddenly he threw the door open and said, “Come in”.
N.C.: What has photography contributed to your life?
A. S.: Photography is time remembered friends, past and present. Brassai comes to my mind: We had visited him and his wife in Beaulieu-sur-Mer – and we took him to the beach and he fled across the sand and dived into the sea. Helmut raced after him and fished him out. All during this time I had my camera at the ready – as Brassai stepped under the shower, the last words I ever heard from him were, “It was worth it”! I’d already obeyed Gilberte’s instructions “Don’t you dare take photographs!” I should not have listened to her. I should have learnt a lesson from Lartigue when he was sitting on a yacht and I disturbed his reverie to ask if I could take a picture of him. “Never ever ask”, he said, “Take the picture”. Relaxing in the backroom of a restaurant one summer’s day, I once again asked Lartigue if I could photograph him. “Go ahead”, he said, “There is no light”. Another monstre sacré was Joseph Losey. When I asked him to give me a few minutes in his courtyard one winter’s day in Paris, he was most obliging and as I shot away, he kept on repeating, “There’s not enough light, there’s not enough light!” But, I always think: If I can see them, so can my camera.
N.C.: What makes one a good photographer?
A. S.: What makes one a good carpenter, a good printer? What makes one a good surgeon? Many are called, few are chosen. A camera is always present, loaded, ready.
N.C.: Which one do you consider as being the best photograph you have ever taken?
A.S.: Graham Greene, simply because it was the only portrait of mine that Helmut was ever jealous of. But, the most beautiful portrait I’ve ever taken must be the one of Helmut on his deathbed. Who will take me on mine?
All images: Alice Springs
Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved
Published in Eyemazing. Issue 01-2008
