When celebrated photographer Arnold Newman began his career in 1938 in chain portrait studios in Philadelphia, Baltimore and West Palm Beach, he also immediately began to make abstract and documentary photography on his own, studying people and places impoverished by the Depression. In June of 1941, Beaumont Newhall of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Alfred Stieglitz "discovered" him, and he was given an exhibit with Ben Rose at the A.D. Gallery that September. There Newman began to combine his independent work with the portraiture that had been his bread-and-butter, developing the approach for which he is best known, which came to be called "environmental portraiture," and which is so widely influential today that it might be the new standard practice. This style made Newman a distinctive contributor to publications like Life, Vanity Fair, and the New York Times Magazine, brought him into the collections of museums around the world, including The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the International Center of Photography in New York, and led to his recognition in photography histories and with awards including France's Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters. The photographs collected here were made before Newman achieved recognition as a pioneering portraitist, during the formative years from 1938 to 1942. They highlight the early stirrings of a great photographic master.

Arnold Newman: The Early Work

Arts & Photography

Brookman, Philip

Individual Artists

Steidl The Masters

"War is over; the heroic French population reaffirms superiority. Love, Paris, and Flowers but London was black, white, and gray, the elegance, the style, all present in front of always changing fog. Then I met a man from Wales talking about the Miners and I had read How Green Was My Valley. This became my only try to make a 'Story'." --Robert Frank This magnificent new edition of London/Wales, which features never-before-seen photographs, juxtaposes Frank's images of the elegant world of London money with the grimy working-class world of postwar Wales--bankers opposite coal miners. It brings together two distinct bodies of work, and reveals a significant documentary precedent for The Americans. In also offers an important view of Frank's development, demonstrating an early interest in social commentary, in the narrative potential of photographic sequencing, and innovative use of the expressionistic qualities of the medium.

London/Wales

Me and My Brother, Robert Frank's first feature-length film, premiered at the 1968 Venice Film Festival. Everything that had defined Frank's art up to that point is packed into this film--the view of America as if from the outside, the placement of the marginal in a central role, the poetic libertinage of the Beats. The story, which takes place during the showing of another film in a rundown movie theater, weaves together opposites, playing the counterfeit against the authentic, pornography against poetry, acting against being, Beat cynicism against hippie romanticism, monochrome against color. Me and My Brother celebrates the poetic essay, affirms the underground and the assemblage form, and packs in some bizarre twists and turns. This book and DVD set includes stills, dialogue and the re-edited 85-minute film.

Me and My Brother

C'est vrai! (One Hour) is a single-take of Robert Frank and actor Kevin O'Connor walking and riding in the back of a minivan through lower Manhattan. Shot between 3:45 and 4:45 p.m. on July 26, 1990, it appears to document a journey, but this little and little-known book, first issued by Hanuman in 1992, reveals it to have had a script (by Frank and his assistant, Michal Rovner) and enough actors (27) and crew to fill two pages of credits. Frank also acknowledges that a conversation heard in a diner is written by Mika Moses, but that Peter Orlovsky's crucial plot-turning lines, intercepted by Frank roughly halfway through the hour, in front of the Angelika Cinema on Houston Street, are "total improvisation." C'est Vrai is published as a part of a long-term program to re-issue all of Frank's works; the film will also be issued as a DVD within Robert Frank: The Complete Film Works.

Robert Frank: One Hour

One of the world's most influential photographers, Bruce Davidson, takes readers inside three midcentury big tops in images that are poetic, realistic and profound. He reveals not only the swiftly vanishing cultural phenomenon of the circus, but what might be called the eternal human circus. At a three-ring show in 1958 he climbed to the top of the tent to view the performances of the famous liontamer Clyde Beatty and human cannonball Hugo Zacchini. His deeper interest lay in the daily lives of circus performers and producers--the roustabouts and riggers, and the pretty girl who rode an elephant in what was called the "spec." He also made an intimate series of a dwarf clown. In 1965 at a huge multi-ring coliseum show, Davidson took a more critical look at performances under a steel-and-concrete environment; continuing behind the scenes, his vision became sharper and more surreal. And in 1967, Davidson caught the elegant exuberance of an Irish one-ring circus. He photographed the kinds of performances that are the essence of the medium, including a face-to-face encounter with an exceptional trapeze artist. Most of these pictures are published here for the first time.

Bruce Davidson: Circus

Holmes, Sam

Jim Dine, among whose earliest major successes were late 1950s Happenings (on which he worked with Claes Oldenburg and John Cage, among others), has been associated with Pop, Neo-Dada and other mischievous movements of his era, and has survived them all. His visual work in mixed-media assemblages, to which he attached emotion-tugging souvenirs including clothing, shoes, rope and tools, led into what has become a remarkable, continually evolving corpus of paintings, sculpture, photographs, and, increasingly importantly, prints. Working not just from his own studios in Vermont, New York and London, but with production houses in Los Angeles, Vienna, Rome and Paris to name but a few, he has been creating editions that push the limits of their media in size and scope, full of persistent icons and themes, lately more often from nature than around the house. Owls, hands, trees, apes and ravens have taken their places alongside his hearts and palettes and bathrobes. This important survey brings together more than 200 works covering a fertile 20-year period in the thick of Dine's printmaking, and during a time when printmaking has been in the thick of his artistic practice. It includes original etchings, lithographs, woodcuts and limited edition artists' books, and several particularly important series, such as the 12 large woodcuts, Winter Dream (for V.), 55 Portraits and his latest lithographs, which reflect an ongoing obsession with Pinocchio.

L'Odysée de Jim Dine: A Survey of Printed Works from 1985-2006: A Survey of Printed Works from 1985 - 2006

Joubert, Caroline

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