Helmut Newton was born in Berlin in 1920, and the city remained a charged point of reference long after he was forced to flee Nazi Germany at eighteen. Helmut Newton. Berlin, Berlin brings that relationship into focus through photographs made from the 1930s to the 2000s. Berlin appears here not simply as a setting, but as a recurring source of memory, theatricality and social observation within Newton’s work.

The book ranges across the fields that shaped his career: fashion, portraiture and the nude. Its subjects include late-night patrons in clubs and restaurants, figures photographed in the boarding houses Newton remembered from his youth, and personalities connected with Berlin cinema. Hanna Schygulla and Wim Wenders appear at the Berlin Wall; John Malkovich and David Bowie also enter this cast. Familiar images are placed alongside less widely known photographs, allowing continuities in Newton’s treatment of bodies, interiors, celebrity and urban performance to emerge across several decades.

A pivotal episode came in 1979, when the relaunched German Vogue commissioned Newton to retrace locations associated with his early life. The resulting portfolio, Berlin, Berlin!, supplied the title later used for an exhibition marking twenty years of the Helmut Newton Foundation. The project therefore binds personal recollection to editorial photography and to Berlin’s changing cultural landscape, rather than presenting the city as a fixed historical subject.

The biographical arc has an unusually precise conclusion. In October 2003, shortly before his death, Newton transferred substantial parts of his archive to the new foundation in the Museum of Photography beside Zoologischer Garten station—the station from which he had left Berlin in 1938. Published by TASCHEN as a 244-page multilingual hardcover, this volume deserves collectors’ attention for the breadth of its chronology and for the concentrated view it offers of one city’s enduring place in Newton’s photographic imagination.