Arnold Newman, Portrait Extraordinaire

Artist set up emotionally intense scenes for celebrity shots.

“We don’t take pictures with cameras — we take them with our hearts and minds.” — Arnold Newman

Chairs of loneliness in Krakow, Poland Jewish Ghetto framed using minimalism employed by Arnold Newman

Arnold Newman, a master of twentieth-century photography, had a vast repertoire of subjects and objects. While he focused on environmental portraits, his photographs include several still lifes, street scenes, and architectural shots.

Newman communicated intense emotions in his photography — primarily environmental portraits—first, the most shocking.

Some of Newman’s photos were downright ominous. “On looking at his environmental portraits, the first thing that struck me was the overriding dark and haunting feel that many of them have” (Wilson & Wilson, 2018).

As I carefully curated my photos to find a cover image, I scrolled through labels that included symmetry. I encountered one compelling emulation that illustrates the use of it in a disturbing fashion — one that represented the horrors of the Holocaust.

The fridgidly chairs in the photo above are of an installation erected in Krakow, Poland, in 2005. Its message: loneliness. The loneliness that Jewish people faced while waiting for the eerie fate they were to experience.

What does Newman have to do with the above photo? Here’s the story:

My image above shows that Newman’s profound and thoughtful shots implemented symmetry, simplicity, and emotion, sometimes stretching the lengths of horror to the darkest place of the human psyche regardless of whether the subjects included them.

Eleanor Roosevelt, Pablo Picasso, Frank Lloyd Wright, Golda Meir, Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe, Salvador Dalí, and President Bill Clinton were among his subjects…yet he didn’t consider these to be the cream of the crop.

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