We do not take pictures with our cameras, but with our hearts and minds.
Arnold Newman
Imagine, for a moment, that you are the young photographer Arnold Newman. You are 28 years old, relatively unknown, and trying to make your way in the New York photography ‘scene’ when, suddenly, Harpers Bazaar, a sophisticated and elegant magazine, commissions you to take a portrait of the great composer Igor Stravinsky, who is visiting town.
Stravinsky invites you to his hotel room for the photo shoot. He’s world-renowned, hugely famous. But the setting he suggests is just not right for you. He is, after all, a composer and an hotel room is a somewhat un-musical setting.
Dare you demur at his suggestion? Can you ask him to pose for you somewhere else?
Arnold Newman did. “I just started thinking,” he recalled in an interview, years later. “I loved classical music, I loved his work. And then it hit me: the piano is such a wonderful, beautiful, musical shape.” So he asked Stravinsky to pose somewhere where there was a piano.
That might have been the end of the story. The temptation to move to the concert hall where Stravinsky was performing and photograph ‘The Great Composer at His Piano’ must have been strong. But what sort of a photograph would have resulted? A cliché, no doubt. Competent, adequate, but immediately forgettable.
Newman resisted the lure of the simple. Instead, he recalls, “ … we found the perfect piano in an editor’s house, took down one picture there, hanging on one wall, and it made a beautiful composition. The piano is a strong, harsh, linear, but very beautiful shape, that looks like a B flat. It was just perfect for what I had in mind.”
Igor Stravinsky © Arnold Newman 1946
In this portrait Newman uses a single light source and photographs from some distance. The piano dominates Stravinsky, who is sitting almost off the edge of the image, in a thoughtful pose.
Newman was shooting with a large-format camera, using 4 x 5 inch negatives, so he has obviously cropped this image severely. To some photographers of his era – Henri Cartier-Bresson in particular – this was a no-no. Cartier-Bresson believed that the photographer should envisage every image before firing the shutter, and then print from the full negative.
But for Newman, “… there are no rules and regulations. You have to compose by the seat of your pants.”
To help him with his composition Newman used two L-shaped pieces of card which could be placed to form a rectangle, and moved around to find the best composition.
It is not a flattering portrait. But then Newman has stated that portraiture is “… saddled with a history of flattery, fawning, ridiculous images, standard poses, attitudes … tainted with the worst of commercialisation.”
And the final result? An arresting photograph that has become one of the great images in the field of portrait photography.
“Stravinsky loved it,” Newman said. “And I loved it. But for some reason or another Harper’s Bazaar couldn’t run it.”
Read an interview with Arnold Newman, from which some of these quotes are taken, here.
What wonderful inspiration. I pray for such insight every day, but it is sometimes possible to do better by absorbing the work of the genius’ of the past.
Hi Alistair. I went for an interview as a photographerrs asisstant when I was younger. Instead of taking a portfolio. I took a magazine which had a full page bleed of Newmans picture of Stravinsky. I asked the photographer if he could take pictures as good as Newmans. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t get the job. However, the picture has remained my absolute favourite. Regards, Colin Medas ( uk ).
Thanks Colin. That’s a great story! I’ll bet the photographer was surprised to be asked that.
By the way, I’m gradually closing down this site and moving over to my personal website http://www.alistairscott.com Running 2 sites takes up too much time, and I’m consolidating.