Less Kinky, More Soulful: A Retrospective Of June Newton's Photography

BERLIN - When Helmut Newton came down with the flu while living in Paris in 1970, he was faced with a quandary: Who would photograph the Gitanes cigarette advertising campaign he was slated to shoot that week? In stepped his wife, June, a moderately accomplished actress who went by the stage name "Alice Springs" - which after that successful campaign would also become her pseudonym behind the lens. Now, an exhibition that takes its name from that alias is on display at the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin, representing the first retrospective of June Newton's work.

The show consists of approximately 250 photographs taken by June, now in her late eighties and living in Monte Carlo. Though not as prolific as her late husband - whose 66-pound book of photos, SUMO, she edited - her work is as consistently seductive as Helmut's, but in a way that seems more insidious and subtle than her husband's in-your-face kink. As June herself once explained, the difference between her style and that of her husband was always significant, even as they captured many of the same subjects: "You will never see a regard in anybody's eyes in Helmut's pictures," she told the Guardian. "You will only see the eyes. He wasn't interested in people. 'I'm not interested in soul,' he said. But I was, and I tried to steal them."

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