Biography provided by Focal press
 
Born in New York, Newman might have become a painter but for the fact that his family's finances from several oceanside hotels evaporated in 1938 while he was studying art at the University of Miami. As compensation for disrupted academic study, Newman accepted work with a family friend who ran a chain of cheap, mass production portrait studios (Perskie's in Philadelphia area department stores). For about a year, Newman makes 49 cent portraits, toils in the darkroom but becomes encouraged by his vision for meaningful photographs. By 1940 Newman adopts the camera as his artist's tool and makes portraits (especially artists), abstractions, and social documentation. In 1946 he is in New York and begins freelance assignments for Harper's Bazaar and LIFE. His most famous image is a 1946 portrait of Igor Stravinsky in the extreme lower left corner of a graphic space dominated by the silhouette lid of his piano — ironically, rejected for publication by Brodovitch for Harper's Bazaar. During the next half century, Newman's portraits established the high water mark for "environmental portraiture." The highest echelon of these groups — artists, presidents, corporate leaders, musicians, authors — have been the subjects of Newman compositions (most in black and white) that place the personality in a dynamic equilibrium with that person's tools, creations, symbols, or work space. Max Ernst sits in a high-back, ornate throne next to a kachina, his head wrapped in surreal curls of smoke; Mondrian is amid a geometric grid of his canvases and an easel. Shooting 24 covers for LIFE, Newman's work has also appeared in Fortune, Look, Holiday, Esquire, Town and Country, and The New Yorker. A recent monograph, Arnold Newman (Taschen, 2000), is a comprehensive survey of Newman's photographic oeuvre with biographical essays, a chronology, and extensive bibliography.
 
(Author: KW)
 
Michael Peres (Editor-in-Chief), 2007, Focal Encyclopedia of Photography, 4th edition, (Focal Press) [ISBN-10: 0240807405, ISBN-13: 978-0240807409] (Used with permission)
 
Wikipedia
 
Arnold Abner Newman (March 3, 1918 - June 6, 2006) was an American photographer, noted for his "environmental portraits" of artists and politicians. He was also known for his carefully composed abstract still life images. In 2006, he was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum.