June Newton (1923-2021), the Australian born photographer and actress also known as Alice Springs, died on Saturday, April 9, at the age of 97 in her Monte Carlo home. The wife of late photographer Helmut Newton worked with her husband on the design and publication of his many monographs, and adopted a pseudonym when photographing art, fashion, and entertainment luminaries such as Yves Saint Laurent, Audrey Hepburn, Grace Jones, and Diana Vreeland.
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Born June Browne in Melbourne in 1923, Newton trained as an actor, performing under the name June Brunell. In 1947, she met Helmut Newton, the son of a wealthy German-Jewish industrialist who had fled his homeland at the age of 18 to escape the Nazis. He worked in Singapore as a high-class gigolo before being sent to Australia as an enemy alien. Helmut had became a British subject, anglicized his name, and opened a fashionable Flinders Lane photography studio in Melbourne, where he met June, who was hoping to make some extra money as a model.
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“I looked at the pictures on the wall and I fell in love with them,” June told The Guardian in 2006. Helmut told June, “Photography will always be my first love, but you will be my second.” They wed the following year, in 1948, and remained married until Helmut’s 2004 death following a car accident in Los Angeles at the age of 83.
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