PHOTOGRAPHS
Newman, Arnold
U.S. (1918 - 2006)
Alfred Krupp
1963
Gelatin silver print
13 3/4 x 9 7/8 in. (34.9 x 25 cm) image and sheet size
Joseph and Elaine Monsen Photography Collection, gift of Joseph and Elaine Monsen and The Boeing Company
FA 97.265

The formal studio portrait dominated the American scene between the World Wars. At the end of World War II, Arnold Newman was one of a handful of New York City photographers who championed the return of “environmental portraiture”, a form in which individuals are posed in their own living and working spaces, places full of details that illuminate personality, character and personal history. Among his most famous sitters were socialites, politicians, celebrities and artists such as Georgia O’Keeffe, Pablo Picasso and Igor Stravinsky. Newman, an American-born Jew, also photographed German industrialist Alfred Krupp, whose family factories served the Nazis during their reign of terror. Krupp unwittingly set himself up for critique and ridicule, as Newman posed, lit and framed him to appear positively demonic in front of his machines. In so doing, Newman exacted a small revenge on an individual whose success was built in part on the support of a genocidal political regime. As Newman commented, photographers inevitably shape the images they capture: “[we] don’t take photographs with our cameras, we take them with our hearts and minds. They are a reflection of ourselves, what we are and what we think.” -- Label copy for The Photographic Impulse: Selections from the Joseph and Elaine Monsen Photography Collection, July 12 to November 10, 2002.