ARNOLD NEWMAN
New York City. 22 October, 2004.
Arnold Newman was born in New York and studied art at Miami University. He became a photographer because he couldn't afford to finish his university course. He left and was offered a job through a family friend as an apprentice to a professional photographer.
His first pictures of people were taken on the street, but he was particularly influenced by the photography of the FSA photographers including Walker Evans. They posed their subjects in their living rooms or in front of their bomes for their documentary portraits. It was an approach Newman used and developed as 'environmental portraiture' more than six decades ago. In his images, his subjects were carefully placed amid surroundings that commented in some way on their personality or achievements.
"I didn't just want to make a photograph with some things in the background," Newman said. "The surroundings had to add to the composition and the understanding of the person. No matter who the subject was, it had to be an interesting photograph. Just to simply do a portrait of a famous person doesn't mean a thing."
Newman became one of the 20th Century's foremost photographers not only because of who he shot, but how he shot them. Over the next 50 years, Newman went on to photograph most major celebrities of the 20th century for magazines such as Life, Look, Fortune, Holiday, The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker, including Igor Stravinsky with the lid of his grand piano making a note, Leonard Bernstein, George Harrison, Alexander Calder, Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, Francis Bacon, Edward Hopper, Salvador Dali, Georgia O'Keefe, Berenice Abbott, Alfred Stieglitz, Franz Kline, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Max Ernst,Isaac Asimov, Eugene O�Neill, Paul Auster, Harry S. Truman, Yitzhak Rabin, Dwight Eisenhower, Marilyn Monroe, and even that so-called invisible man of the camera, Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Some of his famous work
MARYLIN MONROE, Hollywood, 1962 © Photo Arnold Newman
ANDY WARHOL, New York, 1973 © Photo Arnold Newman
IGOR STRAVINSKY, New York, 1946 © Photo Arnold Newman
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