Helmut Newton & Alice Springs. Us and Them

For decades Helmut Newton was the famous one, the name on the provocative fashion spreads and the museum retrospectives. His wife June, who photographed under the name Alice Springs, worked the same subjects and the same cities from a few feet away and an entirely different temperament. Us and Them sets the two of them on facing pages and asks what a marriage looks like when both people carry cameras.

The pairing is not a novelty act. It is a genuine test of how much of a photograph belongs to the person holding the camera rather than the person in front of it.

Alice Springs came to photography almost by accident. In 1970, when Helmut collapsed with a heart attack, June finished a cigarette commercial he could not shoot, and the stand-in assignment turned into a career of her own. She took the working name from an atlas and kept it.

In time she built a reputation independent of his. She exhibited and published under the Springs name, and she was never merely the photographer's wife with a spare camera. The portraits earned their own place.

The book divides in two. One half collects their portraits of shared sitters and the wider world they moved through; the other turns the lenses on each other. The structure is simple and the payoff is not.

The project began as two separate books before it was bound into one. That history is worth knowing, because the dialogue was assembled after the fact. Two bodies of work discovered they had been in conversation all along.

Newton's portraits are staged and theatrical, alert to power and its postures. He arranges a sitter the way he arranges a fashion shot, and the control is half the message.

Alice Springs works closer and warmer. Her portraits catch people looking back rather than performing. The difference is not a matter of skill but of appetite; she wants candor where he wants theater.

They photographed many of the same faces, the artists and actors and designers of their Paris and Berlin years. Seeing those faces twice, once through each set of eyes, is the quiet engine of the whole thing. Recognition becomes a way of measuring two sensibilities against each other.

The roster reads like a census of their milieu: painters, filmmakers, models, the fashion world that employed them both. Newton tends to catch these people performing their public selves. Springs tends to catch them setting the performance down.

Watch how each handles a hand or a mouth. Newton finds the theatrical gesture and freezes it; Springs waits for the unguarded one and takes it. The vocabularies rarely overlap.

The portraits of each other are the heart of it. Here the professional eye meets forty years of intimacy, and each knows precisely what the other is doing. Newton photographs June with a directness he rarely granted his fashion work; June photographs Helmut stripped of the mythology his own pictures spent a lifetime building.

June outlived Helmut by two decades and kept his archive alongside her own. That fact gives the mutual portraits a second life on the page, one partner's eye preserved by the other. The pairing becomes a record of a marriage as much as a method.

None of it reads as competition. The book is generous to both and never ranks them. The pleasure is in the dialogue, not the verdict.

The result works as a plain lesson in how much the photographer, not the subject, decides. Same faces, same rooms, two outcomes that could never be confused. The sitter was never the whole story.

For a working portrait shooter the takeaway is bracing. Two disciplined professionals photograph the same people and share no common ground in the result. Style is not a filter applied at the end; it is the entire way of seeing.

TASCHEN prints it generously, and the scale helps. Newton's blacks stay deep and deliberate; Alice Springs keeps her mid-tones soft and human. The paper lets both approaches breathe.

What the pairing leaves open is harder than its premise. If two photographers this close, working the same subjects for a lifetime, still make pictures this distinct, how much of any portrait was ever about the person in front of the lens? Us and Them poses that and, wisely, lets it stand unanswered.