Helmut Newton

Born in Berlin in October of 1920 to Jewish parents Klara “Claire” (nee Marquis) and Max Neustadter, a button and buckle factory owner, Newton purchased his first camera at age 12.

With the onset of the Nuremberg laws and following the infamous “Kristallnacht,” his family was
briefly interned in a concentration camp. Newton’s parents fled to South America while Helmut, 18, secured a passport leaving Germany in December of 1938. In Trieste, along with 200 others escaping the Nazis, Newton boarded a ship for China, landed in Singapore, and began an
odyssey, which took him to Sydney, Australia, in 1940, to London in 1945, and ultimately to Paris.

It was in Paris that he worked at French Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, creating what was to become a lifelong career as a photo/artist and, historically, the legendary iconic photographer who shook off all constraints via his broad view of capturing the provocative worlds of beauty, eroticism, humor, money, power and, at times, violence.