Newton, Riviera & Dialogues

With ‘Dialogues. Collection FOTOGRAFIS x Helmut Newton,’ the Helmut Newton Foundation offers a completely new perspective on the oeuvre of its founder – a playful experiment that only reveals itself and reaches its full potential when viewed on site.

In collaboration with the ‘Collection FOTOGRAFIS’ from the Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien, the new exhibition partnership presents over 60 diptychs. Inspired in part by the Collezione Ettore Molinario's Dialogue newsletter, which presents two different photographs from the renowned Milanese collection, selected works from the prestigious Viennese collection enter into an exciting dialogue with photographs by Helmut Newton from the foundation's own archive.

The two curators, Bettina M. Busse (Kunstforum) and Matthias Harder (Helmut Newton Foundation), combined the photographs associatively and intuitively.

Two images are always shown – portraits, still lifes, landscape or architectural photographs, even surreal, alienated fashion and nude photographs – from completely different periods, placed directly next to each other.
Sometimes they are linked by form, sometimes by content; at times, the combination seems arbitrary or amusing at first glance.
In any case, however, the dialogue between the images opens up an expanded space of imagination for the viewer.

At the Helmut Newton Foundation, the new, experimental exhibition presents a juxtaposition of Newton's photographs with ‘partner motifs’ by Diane Arbus, Alfred Stieglitz, Margaret Bourke-White, Elliott Erwitt, Florence Henri, Duane Michals, Paul Strand, Man Ray, August Sander, Judy Dater, Otto Steinert and many other important names in the history of photography in the 19th and 20th centuries.

In this way, different facets of humanity and the development of social life over an entire century become visible. The pairs of images – sometimes complementary, sometimes contrasting, but always surprising – have never been shown in this form before.

The interplay or even juxtaposition of iconic and unknown photographs from the history of photography illustrates that Helmut Newton also drew inspiration from his work.
At the same time, it shows that strikingly similar images often emerge completely independently of one another in international photography – sometimes even many decades later.