Arnold Abner Newman (March 3, 1918 – June 6, 2006) was an American photographer, noted for his "environmental portraits" of artists and politicians.
[1] His parents owned hotels in both Atlantic City and Miami Beach, and would spend winters in Florida and summers in New Jersey.
[3] Newman photographed well-known celebrities, including Marlene Dietrich, John F. Kennedy, Harry S. Truman, Piet Mondrian, Pablo Picasso, Arthur Miller, Marilyn Monroe, Ronald Reagan, Mickey Mantle, and Audrey Hepburn.
Newman is often credited with being the photographer who articulated and who consistently employed the genre of environmental portraiture, in which the photographer uses a carefully framed and lit setting, and its contents, to symbolize the individual's life and work; a well known example being his portrait of Igor Stravinsky in which the lid of his grand piano forms a gargantuan musical note representative of the melodic structure of the composer's work.
His 1946 black and white portrait of Stravinsky seated at a grand piano[6] became his signature image, even though it was rejected by Harper's Bazaar, the magazine that gave the assignment to Newman.
On December 19, 2005, Newman made his last formal portrait of director James Burrows at the NBC studio on the Saturday Night Live stage.