HELMUT NEWTON POLAROIDS - BERLIN

Helmut Newton Foundation. 

Museum für fotografie 

Jebensstrasse 2 - Berlin

Today I went to see Newton's Polaroids exhibition, I stayed 2h, I loved it. 

First you can visit the permanent room where are exposed many magazine covers (the wall we all dream to have in our living room), Newton's personal belongings, reproduction of his office, awards he received, clothes, books, letters he sent, received and the ones his wife, June, received after his death (2004).  

In this room I also enjoyed, a lot, the amateur films that June Newton made during Helmut's photo shootings with Giorgio Armani, Pierre Cardin, Isabelle Huppert and many others. You have seen the pictures but seeing how they got to it, is something. 

Exhibition poster -

After, you can penetrate the temporary exhibition room and admire. 

There, you will find over 300 "imperfect" images based on the original Polaroids. 

You will immediately recognize his work but at a stage where it is "in a creation process".

The "creation process" looked already pretty extraordinary from my point of view. 

At the time, he used the Polaroid to have an immediate view of his work. 

"As he once described in an interview, this satisfied his impatient urge to want to know immediately how a certain situation would look as a photograph. 

In this context, the polaroid acted as an idea sketch in addition to testing the actual lighting situation and image composition." 

Those images were already available in Pola Woman, published in 1992.

This publication was not very well received  from all critics as some said the perfection of it was questionable. However he reacted saying that "that was exactly what was exciting – the spontaneity, the speed”. 

You will probably agree after seeing the exhibition. 

The small notes you sometimes can read on the sides of the pictures I thought made them so real and remind you the work behind those aesthetic, perfect, legendary photographs. 
You are nearly in Newton Helmut's studio.

Pola Woman by Helmut Newton 

Helmut Newton - Eva Herzigova, Monte Carlo, for Paris Match (1997)

 www.helmutnewton.com