On 6 March 2025 in conjunction with EMOP Berlin 2025, the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin will debut Polaroids, a new group exhibition featuring works by Helmut Newton and numerous other acclaimed photographers. The Polaroid process revolutionized photography in the 1960s. Those familiar with Polaroid cameras will recall the distinctive odor of the developing emulsion and the thrill of watching an image appear instantly. Depending on the camera model, some prints developed autonomously, while others required the manual application of a chemical coating to fix the image. Though not a direct technical precursor to digital photography, Polaroid can be seen as its analogue precursor due to its immediate accessibility. Polaroids are typically considered unique prints. This innovative imaging technology found enthusiastic users worldwide across nearly all photographic genres – landscape, still life, portrait, fashion, and nude photography. Helmut Newton often used a range of Polaroid cameras and instant film backs that replaced the traditional roll film in his medium format cameras. From the 1970s until his death, he primarily used Polaroids as tools for visual sketches, lighting tests, and composition studies during his fashion shoots. Initially created as preliminary studies, Newton published a dedicated book of these images in 1992, followed by a second volume released posthumously in 2011. Both titles remain in circulation today. Some of Newton’s Polaroids, signed as standalone works, are now highly sought after on the art market. The archive of the Helmut Newton Foundation holds hundreds of these original Polaroids, some of which were transferred from the Newton residence in Monte Carlo after the death of June Newton. A new representative selection of these works has now been assembled, complemented by enlargements originally produced for an exhibition curated by June Newton at the Helmut Newton Foundation in 2012. In this new group exhibition, Newton’s Polaroids are presented alongside numerous works by other photographers, in collaboration with WestLicht/OstLicht in Vienna, whose extensive Polaroid collection was made available to curator Matthias Harder. The exhibition explores a diverse range of Polaroid processes and formats, and features experimental treatments of individual prints and larger tableaus.

The Helmut Newton Foundation celebrates its 20th anniversary in June 2024 with the group show “Berlin, Berlin”. This exhibition also celebrates the city where Newton was born. In the fall of 2003, Helmut Newton established his foundation in Berlin to house parts of his archive, which opened to the public in June 2004 at the historic Landwehrkasino next to Zoologischer Garten station. It was from this very station that Helmut Neustädter, facing constant threat of deportation as a Jew, fled Berlin in early December 1938 – returning 65 years later as the world-famous photographer Helmut Newton. Since then, the Helmut Newton Foundation and the Berlin Art Library have jointly resided in the historic building now known as the Museum of Photography. After the death of June Newton (also known as Alice Springs) in April 2021, the entire collection of works by Helmut Newton and Alice Springs, along with all archival materials, have been housed in the foundation’s archive. Helmut Newton trained under the legendary photographer Yva in Berlin-Charlottenburg from 1936 to 1938, eventually carving his path in the three genres of fashion, portraits, and nudes, following in her footsteps. After stints in Singapore and Melbourne, Newton’s career took off in Paris in the early 1960s, a period during which he frequently returned to Berlin for fashion shoots in magazines like Constanze, Adam, and Vogue Europe. In this exhibition, we encounter Newton’s models posing at Brandenburg Gate, even before the construction of the Berlin Wall. In 1963, he produced Mata Hari Spy Story, a fashion series featuring Brigitte Schilling that focused on the Berlin Wall, causing quite a stir. In 1979, the newly relaunched German Vogue commissioned Newton to revisit his childhood and youth in West Berlin, visualizing current fashion trends. The result was a multi-page portfolio titled Berlin, Berlin! that inspired the name of this anniversary exhibition. Later works included cover stories for Zeit magazine (1990), Männer Vogue (1991) and the Süddeutsche Zeitung magazine (2001). The other exhibition rooms recontextualize Newton’s iconic and lesser-known images of Berlin from the 1930s to the 2000s. From vintage prints by Yva to Barbara Klemm’s political photojournalism, these images span the Golden Twenties into which Newton was born, the devastation of war, reconstruction, the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall, and the early 21st century. Yevgeny Chaldei, a Russian-Ukrainian photographer, captured iconic images capturing the ground battle around the Reichstag in the final weeks of World War II in the spring of 1945. Meanwhile, Hein Gorny flew over the city the following autumn alongside Adolph C. Byers, documenting Berlin’s ruinous state after the war’s end through striking aerial photographs. In the late 1950s, the precarious situation in the city slowly stabilized, reflected in the works of photographers like Arno Fischer, Will McBride, and F.C. Gundlach, who could still move between the eastern and western parts of the city. However, the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961 drastically altered the city’s dynamics once again. 1966 saw the emergence of the student protest movement in West Berlin, documented by photographers like Günter Zint. Meanwhile, an archival work by Arwed Messmer creatively reinterprets historical photographs compiled by the West Berlin police during this same politically charged period. The Berlin Wall emerges as a recurring motif throughout the exhibition. Twelve folios of found photographs by East German border guards, curated and annotated by Arwed Messmer and Annett Gröschner, offer a detailed look at the Wall in the mid-1960s. The Wall resurfaces in other images as well, reflecting the divided city beyond famous sites like the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag, collectively capturing the mythos of Berlin and its representation. The exhibition fosters an engaging dialogue between pivotal projects that have shaped photographic and film history: Maria Sewcz’s series inter esse is juxtaposed with Michael Schmidt’s Waffenruhe and film stills from Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire. Notably, these works all originate from the late 1980s, predating the fall of the Berlin Wall. The exhibition’s final chapter revolves around the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification, featuring photographs capturing these events and their aftermath. This period is represented by Ulrich Wüst’s Leporellos capturing a city in transition, as well as large-format color photographs by Thomas Florschuetz and Harf Zimmermann depicting iconic central Berlin landmarks. The latter include interiors of the former Palace of the Republic and intriguing new perspectives of the Berlin TV Tower on Alexanderplatz and the Friedrichwerdersche Kirche by Karl Friedrich Schinkel. They are visual testaments to a city fated “to always become and never be” (Karl Scheffler). Newton’s perspective of his hometown, presented through approximately 100 photographs, is complemented, commented on, and reflected by an equally extensive array of images and approaches from fellow photographers and filmmakers throughout the decades in the adjoining rooms. This juxtaposition, fostering reciprocal references, echoes the approach adopted by the Helmut Newton Foundation for the 2022 group show Hollywood – another iconic location of significance to Newton’s visual oeuvre.