![]() ![]() “The boys were on one side or kissing and hugging and the girls are on the other side kissing and hugging … I had never experienced or considered or thought about that, because that type of life just didn’t exist openly in the 50s.” She recalls a cast party for a play where June played Salome. She was one of six from a sheltered Catholic family and still living with her parents. Just 17 when she started the job, now almost 90, Kelly still crackles with energy. “They were a very avant-garde pair for the time,” says Kim Kelly, a model, receptionist and general assistant for Newton for most of the 1950s. June would become his lifelong partner in life and work, and eventually an accomplished portrait photographer in her own right under the name Alice Springs. In 1948, Newton married Australian-born actress June Browne in a Catholic ceremony. All through the city, it’s this real time of refugees building community and spending time together. There’d been a theatre troupe that got trapped here during the war and stayed, and so Yiddish theatre is booming at this time. “It was the heyday of the Kadimah ,” says Silverstein. Newton found community with other exiles, working with photographers such as Henry Talbot and Wolfgang Sievers. All through the city, it’s this real time of refugees building community and spending time together Jordana Silversteinīut Yva was dead, and Newton’s family were far away. The work was dull – a far cry from his apprenticeship as a teenager with Jewish fashion photographer Yva in cutting-edge Berlin, who favoured double exposure and androgyny. ![]() Catalogue work for local Jewish-owned clothing businesses like Rockmans kept Newton afloat. Melbourne’s established Jewish community did what they could to support the new arrivals. The Helmut Newton: In Focus exhibition at the Jewish Museum of Australia in Melbourne. ![]() Her own grandfather, she says, was a tailor. “Flinders Lane and the clothing industry is such a big part of the story for so many Melbourne Jews,” says Dr Jordana Silverstein, a historian of Australian Jewish life at Melbourne University. He had lived for some time in a detention camp in rural Victoria, detained as an “enemy alien” with many other German and Italian refugees, after being deported by the British from the first place he fled to, Singapore. By this time he’d become an Australian citizen and abandoned his birth name, Neustaedter, for something the Anglos wouldn’t find quite so intimidating. Just 26, he’d been stateless since 18, a working photographer since 16 or 17, and steeped in the garment trade since birth. Newton’s Australian career starts, perhaps, in 1947, when he set up a photographic studio at 353 Flinders Lane – then the heart of Melbourne’s fashion industry. Photograph: Helmut Newton FoundationĪ new exhibition of Newton’s life work at the Australian Jewish Museum in Melbourne (open until 29 January 2023) attempts to illuminate the mystery of his early life and work, including many recently rediscovered pieces unseen for decades. ![]()
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