On 28 May 2020, the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin will open its new exhibition “America 1970s/80s” with works by Evelyn Hofer, Sheila Metzner, Joel Meyerowitz, and Helmut Newton. After taking a full-time position with the French edition of Vogue in 1961, Helmut Newton worked in parallel for the fashion magazine’s American edition as well. During this time, he produced images in both Europe and the USA. In New York, Newton delivered his photographs directly to Alexander Liberman, who was the editorial director of American Vogue from the 1960s to the 1990s – not to mention a successful painter, sculptor, and photographer himself. Newton liked the United States and the sense of freedom it offered, and he regularly commuted between the Old and New Worlds. In the 1970s, most of Newton’s American fashion and nude photographs were shot in New York, Las Vegas, Miami, and Los Angeles for various magazines; Newton included some of these in his second photography book, Sleepless Nights (1978). After 1980, when Helmut and June Newton began traveling regularly to Los Angeles to spend the winter months at Chateau Marmont, he made numerous portraits of the “famous and infamous” in and around Hollywood for magazines such as Egoïste, Interview, Vanity Fair, and New Yorker, as well as some nudes for Playboy. The images presented in this exhibition clearly show how Newton’s pictorial language changed during his time in the USA and that portraiture became increasingly important for him...

“The giant gold mine, Serra Pelada, was right before me. When I reached the edge of that enormous hole, my hair stood on end. I had never experienced such a situation. In a split second I saw unfolding before me the history of mankind. The building of the pyramids, the Tower of Babel, the mines of King Solomon. Not a single machine could be heard. All you could hear was the murmur of 50,000 people in a big hole...” (Sebastião Salgado) For the first time in Germany, Galerie Bene Taschen presents a solo exhibition curated from Sebastião Salgado’s haunting and unforgettable cycle “Gold” (1986). A show full of archaic power and density, full of cruel poetry and brutal reality. The photographs Salgado took in and in the face of this situation reveals it all in tense compression at the abyss: greed, death, betrayal, work, and despair. A gathering of values and words that not only reflect Western society, but are also exemplary for the particular conditions in Brazil, especially with regard to the exploitation of nature and the working class.