Photo Book: Arnold Newman

I'm starting a new blog series today and calling it 'Photo Book'.  I'm going to post photography books I've purchased over the years, and what about their work sparked my interest.  My first post is about a photographer I have deep admiration for.  Considered the father of environmental portraiture, he defined a look that has spawned countless contemporaries to follow in his footsteps.  I'm talking about Arnold Newman.  I first fell in love with his work while attending college at the Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara when we all had no real idea of who we were as photographers yet.  I, like my peers, bounced photo genres with an eerie correlation to the kind of assignments we happened to be shooting that week.  Before I fell in love with photographing the landscape, and far before I started shooting architecture I fancied myself a portrait photographer.  Up until I found Newman, portrait photography in my mind was equated with senior portraits and traditional wedding photography (although today, those two genres are venturing deep into the fashion/editorial look breaking all traditional molds and looking great doing it).  I found Arnold Newman buried in the library and instantly recognized the genius.  He told entire stories with single frames and eloquently portrayed his models personality with exquisitely composed images.  Incorporating the individual's environment spoke volumes to each image.  A portrait of painter Willem de Kooning peeking through a split in a paint splattered tarp, showing only half his face and taking up a tenth of the frame tells you all you need to know about the man.  The legendary image of composer Igor Stravinsky leaning on his silhouetted grand piano echoes a single musical note from one of his powerful scores.  The images are not flashy, they are not timely, nor are they meant to fill space in another overpopulated pedestrian publication, destined for the recycle bun.  They are meant for history, to show his subjects as they were, not as they appeared.  My fleeting brush with portrait photography came and went, I was destined to photograph the natural world, but do yourself a favor and browse this book, your creative with forever thank you.

Book: Arnold Newman
By: Philip Brookman
Copyright 2000 Benedikt Taschen Veriag GmbH