Photographer Arnold Newman dies

LOS ANGELES: Photographer Arnold Newman, whose portraits of artists like Igor Stravinsky and Pablo Picasso aimed to capture their souls, not just their faces, died on Tuesday at age 88 at a New York hospital, friends said.   

Newman, whose work appeared frequently in Life magazine, was famed for pioneering a style called 'environmental portraiture' in which an artist and his or her craft were aligned in a pose that could stay with a viewer forever.

Often a painter would be set against his or her works until they seemed a part of it. One of the most famous examples of the style was his portrait of composer Stravinsky, sitting off to the side of a grand piano, his head tiny and in the corner of the picture dominated by the piano's huge, open kidney-shaped sounding board.

His portrait of Picasso showed a pensive artist whose own face might pass for a Picasso painting. His photograph of actress Marilyn Monroe with disheveled hair and seemingly lost in sad thoughts hinted at the dark tragedy that was yet to come.

Jonathan Klein, the chief executive of photo agency Getty Images and a friend of Newman's, called him 'a true pioneer who advanced the art of portraiture throughout his career.'

"He captured the defining images of many of the most notable figures of the 20th century and greatly influenced the generation of photographers who carry on this tradition today," Klein said.

In a career lasting 65 years, Newman photographed hundreds of famed figures in politics, business, arts and letters.

In an interview with Apogee Photo Magazine, Newman recalled that sometimes he was at a loss on how to take a picture as when he photographed Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank, the teenage Dutch girl who came to symbolize the victims of the Holocaust.  

"How could I ask this man to pose? I couldn't. Instead, I just waited and Otto went into a deeply pensive mood. It was then I took the photograph," Newman said. He recalled that the two men embraced and cried when the photo shoot ended, according to interviewer Ysabel de la Rosa.

Newman was born on March 3, 1918, in New York City and raised in New Jersey and Florida. He studied art at the University of Miami and began photography in 1938 in chain portrait studios.  In 1941, he was discovered by Beaumont Newhall of the Museum of Modern Art and famed photographer Alfred Stieglitz and given an exhibit.

His work has been the subject of several books and exhibitions.