Dialogues. Collection FOTOGRAFIS x Helmut Newton
Opening: 4 September 2025, 7 pm // Helmut Newton Foundation, Berlin
On 4 September 2025, the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin will open its new double exhibition: Newton, Riviera and Dialogues. Collection FOTOGRAFIS x Helmut Newton.
With Dialogues. Collection FOTOGRAFIS x Helmut Newton, the Helmut Newton Foundation presents a fresh perspective on the work of its founder. This exhibition takes the form of a playful visual experiment – one that fully unfolds through the viewer’s on-site experience.
On two occasions in recent years, the Helmut Newton Foundation has presented private photography collections in addition to its solo and thematic group exhibitions. The first was Between Art & Fashion (2018), showcasing Carla Sozzani’s private collection from Milan. The second, in 2024, was Chronorama, originally presented at Palazzo Grassi in Venice and based on the photographic holdings of the Condé Nast Archive, which had recently become part of the Pinault Collection. Helmut Newton featured in both, having worked extensively for Condé Nast publications such as Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Traveler over the decades.
Both shows were distinctly curated for the foundation’s exhibition spaces in Berlin: Between Art & Fashion was arranged alphabetically by nearly 100 featured photographers, while Chronorama followed the chronology of image creation or publication in Condé Nast magazines. Each presented a wide range of iconic images from the history of photography.
This same ambition continues – this time in a new format. The current collaboration, with the Collection FOTOGRAFIS of the Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien, comprises more than 60 diptychs. Inspired in part by the Dialogues newsletter from Milan’s Collezione Ettore Molinario – which regularly pairs contrasting images from its archive – the exhibition brings selected photographs from the Viennese collection into dialogue with works by Helmut Newton from the foundation’s own holdings. Curators Bettina M. Busse (Kunstforum) and Matthias Harder (Helmut Newton Foundation) paired the images through an intuitive, associative process. Each diptych features two portraits, still lifes, landscapes, architectural images, or surreal reinterpretations of fashion and nude photography – shown side by side across different eras. At times the connections are formal, at others thematic. Some combinations may appear humorous or even arbitrary at first glance, but in every case, the interplay between images opens up a broader space for imagination.
This new experimental exhibition at the Helmut Newton Foundation explores the many facets of human experience and the evolution of social life over the course of a century – through the juxtaposition of Newton’s photographs with “partner images” by Diane Arbus, Alfred Stieglitz, Margaret Bourke-White, Elliott Erwitt, Florence Henri, Duane Michals, Paul Strand, Man Ray, August Sander, Judy Dater, Otto Steinert, and other key figures from the photographic canon of the 19th and 20th centuries. These pairings – sometimes complementary, sometimes contrasting, always unexpected – have never been presented together before. The interplay of iconic and lesser-known works reveals not only how Newton’s photography engaged with broader photographic traditions, but also how remarkably similar visual ideas have often emerged independently in international photography – sometimes even many decades later.
