
June at Night, Ramatuelle
Helmut Newton's muse and wife June poses liberally in the olive grove in Ramatuelle at night. The couple bought a house in this small town on the Côte d'Azur in 1964 and spent many months of the year staying there.
June Browne was born in Melbourne in 1923, and first worked as an actress. In 1947 she met Helmut Newton, who had set up a photo studio in Melbourne shortly before, and married him a year later. In 1970, she represented Helmut Newton, who was briefly ill, for an advertising assignment in Paris, thus beginning her own career as a photographer, this time under the pseudonym Alice Springs.
The photographs that the couple repeatedly took of each other appeared in 1998 in the illustrated book "Us and Them", in which a variant of June at Night is also shown. These private photographs are wonderful odes to a professional and romantic partnership that would last a lifetime. June photographed Helmut on set with his models, in the shower and in stilettos. Helmut photographed June in the kitchen, in the garden, hanging laundry, not surprisingly, very often nude. The special appeal of these nude photographs also lies in the fact that they reveal just as much attraction and beauty as Newton's photographs do in a professional context.