The work of Arnold Newman

Arnold Newman was best known for his environmental portraiture of all kinds of people from everyday strangers to big industry names. His collections of black and white photography captured these individuals in their natural environment in order to display how each individual’s environment is so diverse from another.

“For five decades Arnold Newman stood behind his camera, facing individuals and egos that have shaped the realities of twentieth century life. Emperors, poets, dancers, composers, presidents,
painters and shoemakers have all collaborated with him, placing themselves in his trust to be properly portrayed.”

Here is some of his work showing how he went about his portraiture photography…

His work showed the emotions, the surroundings and the spaces in which these people are situated in everyday life.

Work Analysis

This photograph taken by Arnold Newman, is of Igor Stravinsky, an influential Russian composer. The image simply displays the basic context of Stravinsky’s everyday life as a composer, through the association of the grand piano which represents and symbolizes his musical career that has made him who he is. In a way Stravinsky has been subtly framed in this photograph by the lines and open angle of the piano, in which he is within the angle, therefore drawing the viewers eye to his and the tonal split in the wall behind. The dark tones of the piano and the composer stand out to the lighter tones of the wall behind them. This emphasizes the the parts of the photograph that could be considered most important and contextual. The image its self appears to be of an only slightly under exposed with a high contrast as the dark tones in the image stand out considerably. The expression of Stravinsky in this image captures the feelings that he would experience on a day to day basis with the constant feeling of needing to compose songs, with most days not coming up with anything new making his time monotonous, hence his tiresome expression.

Environmental portraiture is portraiture which is executed in the subject’s normal environment, this emphasizes the subject’s life through their surroundings. Environmental portraits give context to the subject being photographed. Environmental portraits lie between quite strict studio portraits and candid portraits; the subject is relaxed however is aware they are being photographed.

Here are some examples found online of how environmental portraiture can be executed…

When executing an environmental portrait it is most effective for the subject of the piece to be facing and if possible looking into the lens of the camera which creates an emotional eye contact, which depending on the expression of the subject could imply further context to the image.

The purpose of environmental portraiture could be to document or display the everyday life of a certain individual, whilst they are in their usual environment.

My Final Piece

For my final piece I have chosen to go with a composition of 9 images (3 groups of 3.) This is because I believe that rules of 3 look very aesthetically pleasing to a viewer.

I believe that the images strongly portray a sense of abstraction through the use of color, minimalism, PhotoShop, composition and structure.

Original Images

Here are the 9 images that I have chosen to use as my final piece…

All of these images have been edited using PhotoShop, some more than others. I would have considered all of the images to have been abstract before editing them however I believe that the PhotoShop editing that I have done has increased how abstract the images are.

Originals & Edits

Here are the original images against the edited images that I have produced…

Edits (LEFT) Originals (RIGHT)

Grouping

For my final composition of photographs I have decided to group them into 3 groups of 3 (9 all together.) This is because I believe that visual threes work very well visually therefore 3 groups consisting of 3 images would hopefully work very well.

I wanted the organisation between portrait and landscape images to be symmetrical therefore I composed the portrait images in a cross (X) and the landscape images on each ends of the across sections (+). I believe that this gave a very visually pleasing result.

Here is my original basic composition of images (3×3)…

Further Improvements (inspiration)

I was happy with how this appeared, but I wanted my final piece to be slightly more interesting to the eye.

One of my favorite abstract artists, Keith Haring‘s bold, minimalist and colorful work is what inspired me to group of the 3 groups of images using colorful polygons. The 3 groups that I sectioned my images off into were: Visually Melting, Visually Minimalist and Visual Text.

Here is some of the work of Keith Haring to give an idea of how it is reflected in my final piece…

Here is what my piece looked like after adding the colored sections…

However I was still not 100% satisfied with the full aesthetic of the piece. I wanted to add titles/names to the 3 groups of images. I wanted to do this without the writing distracting the viewer from the images themselves, so I decided to go with a basic ‘typewriter’ style font called ‘Rod Regular’.

So all together with all final improvements and edits here is my final piece on the work of abstraction…

FINAL PIECE