Environmental Portrait Artist: Arnold Newman

     

 

    Hey Teach, Back for one of our last blogs. Wanted to do someone we talked about and saw more than once, Arnold Newman! He's a really interesting portrait photographer and I've liked almost any image I saw especially the one of that really terrible German guy. My favorite part of his photographs have to be how he doesn't just take a photo of a person but dives into who they are, many of his photos are experimental or have abstract parts to them that relate back to the person hes photographed. I personally love all the ones that are very overt, the ones that shove these abstract ideas in your face and are less subtle, which seem to be his best photos. To go in depth on why I love these I'd have to say that its absolutely the mood and the feelings that the photo's leave me with even after I've seen them. You can tell hes capturing the soul in some of these images rather than just a quick selfie and the more overt they are rather than being surface level to me it feels like Newman has started from the subtle and added so much that you cant ignore it. 

  

    I wanted to, like usual, figure out why Newman takes pictures. "Arnold Newman (1918-2006) is widely renowned for pioneering and popularizing the environmental portrait. With his method of portraiture, he placed his sitters in surroundings representative of their professions, aiming to capture the essence of an individual's life and work." It's not hard to argue that Newman absolutely hit the mark with what he was trying to do, I could see it without any background at all or idea of what he wanted to capture with his photos. I feel the need to thank Newman for his hard work, many of these artists may have been quickly forgotten if not for having the work they spent their life creating being immortalized in his photos.

I'll put the ones I think are the best down below.