Arnold Newman (1918-2006)

#Igor Stravinsky [1946]



Arnold Newman (AN): Like my portrait of Stravinsky. It's not really an environmental ... you know I'm called the father of the environmental portrait?
GI: Yes. What do you think of that label?
AN: I don't mind the label, but I also do other things -- I do abstractions, still lives and photojournalism (like my book on Stravinsky).



#Alfried Krupp [1963]

GI: Have your personal feelings about someone ever affected the way you chose to photograph that person?
AN: There's only twice I ever tried to deliberately show an individual as bad, and that was Alfried Krupp and Richard Nixon. Actually, I didn't do it on purpose to Nixon -- he did it to himself.
I deliberately put a knife in Krupp's back, visually. He was a friend of Hitler's and Hitler let him use prisoners as slave labor. If the prisoners fell, he just unchained them and they went directly into the crematoriums in Auschwitz.
Krupp's people realized I was Jewish, and they were worried that I might not be kind to him. I was trying to figure a way to show who he really was without being obvious. I lit from both sides and I said, "Would you lean forward." And my hair stood up on end. The light from the sides made him look like the devil. It's an un-retouched photograph. He actually was a handsome man.

#Robert Moses [1952]

AN: I did want to show him as the builder of New York. I had the idea exactly as you see it. And he was very happy with it.
We got a huge aluminum I-beam and put big heavy weights on one end so it would be sturdy. The "connector" at the end is an Arnold Newman fake. I got a big piece of cardboard and some clay and I very carefully made it to look that way, then painted it the same color we painted the I-beam. Moses is only about two-and-a-half feet off the ground and about 12 feet from the East River -- it was the angle. And it's just a single shot, un-fake. People say, "Wow, you did a great job on the computer," and I say that computers weren't invented until later.