Photographer Arnold Newman: A true master of the environmental portrait

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by Dan C, Nov 27, 2018.

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  1. Dan C

    Dan C Forum Fotographer Thread Starter

    Location:
    The West
    I always get a thrill when looking at Newman's images. An absolute master.

    You may not know his name, but you know his pictures. "Iconic" is overused, but try not to use it when describing Newman's portrait of Igor Stravinsky. His photo of German industrialist/Nazi collaborator Alfried Krupp is a deep look into a terrible man's dark soul.

    From the article below:
    Mr. Newman went on to photograph Eleanor Roosevelt, Pablo Picasso, Frank Lloyd Wright, Golda Meir, Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe, Salvador Dalí, and the former president Bill Clinton: decidedly on his own terms. There would be no overstuffed costume fittings or stark studios. Mr. Newman’s portraits were defined by his sitter’s environments, which led him to be known as the “father of the environmental portrait.”

    Enjoy!
    Examining Arnold Newman's Environmental Portraits

    dan c
     
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  2. applebonkerz

    applebonkerz Senior Member

    After studying Newman in college, and having a professor encourage the heavy use of his basic concept of environmental portraits, I shot that way for several years afterward. The thing is, until you brought him up I had totally forgotten all about him. His name, and his work beyond just a couple of the more famous images. Even if I would have seen a bunch of those photographs again without the name attached, I never would have remembered who did them. Looking through all of the images in your link, and then expanding out to see what else was shown on the Newman website was a good crash-course refresher. Honestly though, there are only a small percentage of all the images I saw that I would consider great photographs...or great portraits.

    Probably the biggest issue I have with him now is it seems like he wasn't a particularly good technician. Even the photos that have impeccable composition don't also have rich tonality to go with it. Much seems to made of him often using a view camera. So did Yuosuf Karsh, and his portraits even viewed online have a depth and range of tonality that is gorgeous. Any of the same photo subjects -- O'Keefe, Picasso, Wright, etc -- I far prefer the Karsh portrait of that person in every way for capturing the personality of the subject, the composition, and being a beautiful photograph in and of itself.

    To me, all the beauty in Newman's work relies totally on composition and juxtaposition with other objects in the frame. But the images aren't usually lit very well, or exposed/printed very well to bring out either the person that is supposedly being portrayed, or to even make a tonally beautiful image even if the human subject in it is going to be mostly obscured.

    Didn't mean to rain on your thread. I did enjoy seeing the specific images I particularly liked, and exploring others I don't recall having ever seen before. And it inspired me to look through Karsh's work again which I hadn't seen for years either. :thumbsup:
     
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  3. Michael

    Michael I LOVE WIDE S-T-E-R-E-O!

    Dan...thanks for the link...
     
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  4. Dan C

    Dan C Forum Fotographer Thread Starter

    Location:
    The West
    Obviously you meant to post a link to Karsh's work and simply forgot. ;)
    Overview

    This post encouraged me to revisit Karsh's work, which I haven't seen for many years. I remember back in the early-90s seeing an incredible exhibit of very large prints of Karsh's portraits. I was in art school at the time and it was an amazing thing to see.

    I understand what you're saying about Newman's work, and photography is like music in how people can have completely different reactions to the same work.

    Newman and Karsh took such different approaches to their subjects that seeing them together is rather fascinating. Karsh's portraits are quiet and introspective, while Newman's feel less romantic and in some ways more brutally honest.

    And while Karsh made some environmental portraits, Newman really expanded on the genre. Newman wasn't a photojournalist, but he has some of that feel to me. He's more reporting on a subject, where Karsh is reflecting or almost idealizing. Both approaches have their place.

    I do love both of these masters and enjoy reexamining their output. That's why I was so happy to see the NYT article I posted, I too hadn't thought much about Newman in quite some time.

    Portraiture has always been such a challenge for me. I was intensely uncomfortable with portraits well into my newspaper career. I still have never made a portrait remotely approaching Newman or Karsh, but I finally feel like I'm getting a handle on it!

    dan c

    PS: Karsh rarely used the shutter on his 8x10 camera, instead making the exposure by removing the lens cap. Bada$$!
     
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  5. PTgraphics

    PTgraphics Senior Member

    Cool. Thanks for the link. I was at the Carl Sandburg house on Black Friday walking around the trails.
     
  6. applebonkerz

    applebonkerz Senior Member

    Mentioning about seeing them together being fascinating inspired me to make this composite of four images showing how Newman and Karsh portrayed the same two people at (roughly speaking) the same time-period: Georgia O'Keeffe and Frank Lloyd Wright. Both of them being characters in their own fame. Newman's vision is on the left, Karsh's vision is on the right.

    [​IMG]

    I very much agree with your comment that Newman has more the feel of a photojournalist. There are a lot of great photojournalists past and present who have been tasked with shooting a portrait of someone to run with a story. Given access to these two famous people, I'm betting a pretty high percentage could come back with a photo as nice, or better than the examples on the left. I really doubt they would scratch the surface of anything like on the right. There is nothing wrong with being a photojournalist (we both apparently made our living at it for some amount of time) and they can come back from an assignment with a work of art sometimes. But a true artist who uses photography as their only medium gets wholly different quality results in a more consistent manner in my opinion. The FLW portrait by Karsh is just oozing with personality, really showing the man inside the suit. It doesn't show him among his building renderings, but to me it shows way more of who he was. This looks like a devilishly clever, confident, and personable manipulator who could get rich folks to keep spending way more money on projects than they had originally agreed on, and be happy about it in the end. The guy on the left looks like a tired old grandfather bored with getting his photo taken yet again.

    [​IMG] [​IMG]

    One other aspect that I think parallels Newman with a more photojournalist sensibility is the aspect of just shooting a photo however, and cropping it later into an image more striking--rather than composing it full-frame exactly as you want it when you shoot it. Obviously the most famous Newman image, the one of Stravinsky, had been cropped just based on the severe horizontal shape that was outside of the film formats being used at the time. I had no idea before yesterday how much of the image had been cropped from how it was shot. I was even more shocked to see what the original frame of his famous Picasso portrait was actually like. I don't know how you view these things, but that really took a lot of the greatness out of those two images for me. The greatness is more in the cropping--why weren't they just shot that way in the first place, if that was what his vision of the portrait actually was. It turns it more into partly luck and making lemonade out of lemons. Like the way I used to shoot basketball games -- an 85mm f/1.2 so I could keep the shutter speed high enough in lousy light gyms even pushing to ASA1600, and just aim it at the action across the floor. Usually out of a whole roll of film at the game I was lucky to get one or two decent pictures and had to crop the heck out of the frame to get the compelling action shot out of it for the newspaper. But that technique won me a first and third for best sports photo the one year I entered a UPI clip contest. I have way more respect for works of art that are made that way from the very beginning. A full-frame beautiful image looking the same on a contact sheet as it does blown up on the wall shows more inherent talent than a quarter of the image cut out of the frame, rotated at some random angle, then blown up on a wall. But like you said, same as with music, people can have completely different reactions to the same work, and I imagine, different reactions to how that work was arrived at.
     
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