There was much beauty to behold in her subjects, yet in her work, the appearance of the subject is balanced delicately equalled to the tenacious theme. Her models, despite her work leading a commercial theme towards the mid 1930’s, never looked directly at the camera. Her ambition with each frame was to be almost secretly capturing the image while the model appears unaware that she is there.
The subject, lost within herself allows the male viewer to feel like he is watching where he is not allowed, as if he is secondary to the subjects thoughts at the moment the camera takes the picture. This fashionable image has been copied in artistic photography ever since and can still be seen today on covers of the glossiest magazines.
In 1936, her fate had been sealed. Turning down the chance of a lifetime to move to New York and work for Life Magazine, as her husband feared leaving Berlin, she was from then destined to the worst fate that all Jews in Nazi Germany could face. In 1938, she was forced to close her studio, had her work confiscated by the Nazi’s and forbidden to work as a photographer. It was here at Newton’s apprenticeship ended. The young photographer fled Germany with his family and survived the war. Yva didn’t, and stayed to work as an X-ray technician in a local Jewish hospital. In was not long after that she and her husband were rounded up and sent to the concentration camp where they were killed, sometime around 1942.
It wasn’t until around 20 years ago that a handful of boxes containing her work had come to light. It had been thought up until then, that much of her work taken by the Nazis had been destroyed by a bomb in 1943.Even more tragically, much of her work, photographs, negatives and such were stored at the harbour in Hamburg, revealing that she and her husband had indeed, made plans to leave the country.