Alice Springs : The Paris MEP show

When her husband who happened to be world-famous photographer Helmut Newton fell sick with flu on the eve of a pressing deadline in 1970 - it was up to his wife, June, to photograph an advertisement for Gitanes cigarettes. After the barest instruction in lighting and camerawork, June clicked the shutter on a smoking model and ignited her own career behind the lens. Using the pseudonym Alice Springs, June Newton began as a commercial photographer, shooting advertisements for French and international fashion magazines, before exploring portraiture and celebrity via the highlife in Hollywood and lowlife of the L A punk scene during the 1980s.
She became Helmut’s artistic director, collaborating on exhibitions and books as well as developing her own characteristically intense, revealing photography. Coinciding with a major retrospective at the Maison Européene de la Photographie, this TASCHEN collection celebrates Alice Springs’s work with a focus on the glamour and seedy excitement of 1980s Melrose in Los Angeles, as well as some of her most compelling self-portraits and studies of Helmut.
Throughout, we celebrate Springs’s sensitivity to subjects in composition and her particular skill at capturing the charisma animating a figure or face.