Arnold Krupp

Arnold Newman

1963

Photograph of man wearing a suit seated in warehouse facing camera with chin resting on folded hands, framed by two concrete pillars.

When Arnold Newman was asked by Newsweek magazine to photograph industrialist Alfred Krupp, he initially refused. He was repelled by the idea of photographing a man who had been prosecuted as a war criminal for using slave laborers in his factories during World War II and working tens of thousands of them to death. Eventually, Newman decided to take Krupp’s picture, but purposely staged the angle, lighting, and background of the photograph in such a way as to portray Krupp as malevolent. He considered this portrait of evil one of the most important photographs he ever took.

Credits

Arnold Newman / Masters / Getty Images.

Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 9.

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Creator Bio

Arnold Newman

1918–2006

Born in New York, the portrait photographer Arnold Newman captured some of the most prominent cultural personalities of the twentieth century. Pioneering the style of environmental portraiture, Newman photographed his subjects in settings that reflected their character and evoked their particular talents. Newman began his career as an assistant in a photography studio; he opened his own studio in New York in 1946, initially concentrating on portraits of artists before focusing his lens on a more diverse array of famous individuals. During his extensive career, Newman worked for American magazines, including Harper’s Bazaar, Life, Time, and Newsweek. His subjects included artists Pablo Picasso and Georgia O’Keeffe, actors Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn, and politicians John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton.