Arnold Newman

Arnold Newman did not photograph faces so much as the space around them. A sitter’s canvases, tools, furniture or the particular light of a room were treated as evidence, and often pushed so far forward that the person seemed almost a guest inside his or her own portrait. That habit of arrangement — patient, deliberate, made with a large-format camera — became the foundation of what is now called environmental portraiture, and it governs the 280 pages of this Taschen monograph.

The book is built as an arc rather than a sequence of highlights. It opens with socio-documentary photographs made between 1938 and 1942 in West Palm Beach, Philadelphia and Baltimore, early work that shows Newman’s interest in circumstance before circumstance became a portrait strategy. From there the volume moves into close to two hundred portraits spanning the 1940s to the 2000s: Newman as a member of the Photo League in New York, freelance there from 1945, working for magazines while making portraits on his own terms.

The sitters form a cross-section of twentieth-century cultural life. Painters and sculptors from Georgia O’Keeffe and Pablo Picasso through Jackson Pollock, Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol; writers including Vladimir Nabokov, Truman Capote and Allen Ginsberg; scientists such as J. Robert Oppenheimer; politicians from Harry Truman to Golda Meir; musicians, architects, actors. Photographers appear as well — Alfred Stieglitz, Berenice Abbott, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ansel Adams — but as subjects, not as contributors to the book. Read in sequence, the portraits accumulate into a picture of an era assembled from the people who shaped its art, science and politics, each framed by Newman’s staging of their surroundings.

Published in 2006, the year of Newman’s death, the volume carries a summary weight; its text includes a biography of the photographer alongside the plates. For a collector, the argument for it is one of scope rather than scarcity: the early documentary work and six decades of portraiture held in a single hardcover sequence, arranged chronologically, so that you can watch the method form and then adapt to changing commissions and changing sitters. Much of this material was made for magazines and first seen in them; gathered here, it can be read as a continuous body of work.