BERLIN, GERMANY.-June Newton, widow of legendary international glamour and fashion photographer Helmut Newton, gives a press conference on the exhibiton "Helmut Newton's Private Property", 29 October 2004 in Berlin. From 02 November 2004, the Museum for Photography shows private objects of Newton as clothes, cameras and accessories he needed for his work.

Newton, 83, died on January 23, 2004 in Los Angeles. He was laid to rest in Berlin on the day his new Museum for Photography opened in the Friedenau cemetery in his native Schöneberg district, just four plots away from where screen legend and fellow Berliner, Marlene Dietrich, is buried. During the solemn ceremony June Newton, the photographer's widow, said: "To me, Berlin will never again be what it once was." June Newton, who turned 81 on that day and is a photographer in her own right, planned her husband's funeral in detail, saying she wanted a ceremony that reflected her husband's zest for life. She wanted no priest, no mournful dirges and no religious ritual. Instead, she called for bells instead of organs, bright flowers and a joyous celebration of Newton's long life. "Although he was over 80, he simply never grew old," she said. German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit attended the burial and a memorial event afterwards in Berlin's city hall.

Early love for the camera The avant-garde photographer, who was both renowned and scorned for his controversial photographs of nude women, was born Helmut Neustädter to well-off Jewish parents in Berlin in 1920. As a child, Newton preferred taking pictures to doing school work, having bought his first Kodak camera at the age of twelve. At sixteen, he started an apprenticeship with Elsie Simon, a well-known Berlin photographer better known as Yva. He continued working with her until Hitler's pogroms against the Jews forced him to flee in 1938. After a stop in Singapore and a stint in the Australian army, Helmut Neustädter settled in Melbourne, opened a photography studio, and changed his last name to Newton. There he met and married actress June Brunell, who remained his partner for 55 years until his death. Newton began doing fashion photography and soon began shooting for the biggest players in the fashion world: Vogue, Elle, Marie-Claire and Queen.

His provocative and stark style set the standard for the time. But Newton is best known for his shots of nude women, whom he photographed in a both alluring and distant way with the result being a kind of cold eroticism that was seen as alternatively empowering and degrading to women, depending on the viewer. Some female critics, including well-known German feminist Alice Schwarzer, decried Newton's nude women photographs as "sexist to the point of racist and fascist." His detractors called him "King of Kink" and "Prince of Porn." Despite the criticism, Newton achieved world-wide fame with his women. His series of black-and-white oversized prints, entitled "Big Nudes," became his best-known work and individual prints have fetched up to $100,000 at auction.