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1938. It's been 100 years since Talbot and Daquerre invented their photographic processes. It's the time of Piet Mondrian, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Norman Rockwell, Frank Lloyd Wright, John Steinbeck, Walter Lippmann, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Bill Brandt and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Eugene Smith is fired from Newsweek for using miniature (2 1/4) cameras, Edward Steichen retires, Alfred Stieglitz has taken his last photographs and Arnold Newman leaves art school to become a photographer.

To get off his parents' backs financially, Newman took a job to learn photography in Philadelphia and joined friends who had just graduated from the School of Industrial Arts at which Brodevitch was teaching. As a painter, he'd been influenced "by every painter from Rembrandt to Vermeer on up to Picasso, Van Gogh and Matisse". He was excited by photography immediately and began to study Steichen, Stieglitz, Man Ray, the Farm Security Administration and "particularly Walker Evans".

"In the 1930's there were a lot of exciting things going on. In those days you didn't get into photography because it was exciting and with it and you could roll around on no-seam paper with girls, like in Blow Up. You were there because you had to do it, not because of glamor, money, and other extraneous things. As Renoir would say about knowing when you had to be in it was 'like having to take a pee'."

And in it, Newman was. During the next few years, with encouragement from Stieglitz, Adams and Beaumont Newhall, he experimented in cut-outs and abstract photography. In 1941, he and life-long friend, Ben Rose, had a two-man show at the A.D. Gallery in New York. Newman then began working on a series of portraits of artists that led to a Philadelphia Museum of Art show, Artists Look Like This.

Now in 1988, Newman's fiftieth year will be recognized by the latest of his many subsequent shows, Arnold Newman: Five Decades, at The New York Historical Society from September 9 to October 30. The show will then tour the United States. ASMP recognized this as an opportune time to visit with Newman and get his thoughts on the state of the art.

A ring of Newman's studio doorbell brings a woman to the door. With little comment she leads me up a worn stairway. I ask and she confirms that she's Augusta Newman, his wife since 1949. My first impression of his office is that it's disorganized, but a more observant look around reveals that it's simply a lot of material being stored in a barely adequate space. The piles of prints and papers, the shelves filled with hundreds of carefully labeled boxes are all the results of a very productive career.

Newman waves and motions for me to take a seat. He's on the phone trying to work out schedules with the subjects for a Town and Country assignment. He and Augusta sit back to back at their desks and about an arm's length apart. She opens the day's mail, which includes a request for print donations from a foreign organization they've never heard of. He gets off the phone and after a brief discussion, the request is trashed.

Settling down for the interview in the adjacent production room, Newman marvels at the miniature tape recorder that I've placed on the table between us and asks to hear a sample of it's abilities. He's obviously impressed with the technology and its results.

Newman thinks that technology has been a mixed blessing in photography, leading some photographers to a dependency, while freeing others to be more creative. He's seen photography change significantly, attributing some as technological and some as evolutionary. "Every generation changes, or should, but photographers have always been too dependant on technology. Particularly now, you really can just push the button and we do the rest. It focuses, it automatically figures your exposure, it even tells you the time and the day if you want. It practically feeds you and then pats you with a napkin on the cheeks. Naturally, there are photographers that are utterly dependant upon it. They're not real photographers."

When he first got into photography, "Kodachrome came out and this was a miracle to see real color; real live, juicy color. Today we do things with color that we couldn't do with black and white technically. There are unbelievable technical things that are now considered just day to day tools, from strobes, to fast films, fast lenses, that were unheard of. Yet there were great photographs being made by inferior cameras with inferior lenses and inferior film. It was still the human mind and its creativity that made the pictures. All this great technology which we now have at our disposal is simply a tool."

A photographer must be a good technician and learn to use the tools. He forecasts the day when "there will be a photographer and there will be a technician. The photographer will say, 'okay, I want to do this' and the technician will get it done technically while the photographer does the selectivity and the ideas." He points to the movie industry and television as examples saying, "you shouldn't be afraid of it. It's simply that it's going to be a different world. Although I can still see some young kid that will get a hold of a broken down view camera and will just use his head and come out with a revolution."

On the other hand, Newman appreciates the creative freedom that technology can provide. "Degas wanted to take pictures, and just looking at the paintings, you can imagine the kind of photographs he would have made had he of had the fast lenses, the high speed films and the 35mm, that we have today. Most of his paintings, particularly of dancers, were really photographically brought out. So called 'natural vision'; even painting across the orchestra pit and then up onto the stage to the ballet dancers. I think basically any artist, in any field has a vision and he finds the tools with which to do it. The tools were totally inadequate for Degas. Perhaps it's just as well, he was such a marvelous painter.

Many photographers have exceeded the ability of their tools though. "Andre Kertesz in the last decades of his life was more and more bitter. Somebody once said to him, 'isn't it marvelous that Leica invented their camera, so that you can take these pictures?' You can just imagine him very angrily answering, 'I was taking Leica pictures twenty years before the Leica was invented'."

"It's really human beings with visions, concepts and ideas. Everything else is nothing more than technique and subject matter, which a lot of people confuse with creativity." Stressing the need for talent combined with emotional drive and intensity, he cites friends who were killed or wounded in wars. "They were forced by their nature to go out and do it. It's very easy to tell a Gene Smith photograph from a run of the mill snapshot by a photographer who has a camera going whap, whap, whap and hoping to get some action." A review of photos like Smith's Sticks and stones, bits of human bones, underscores his point.

"There are really too many average talents out there being acclaimed for having done pictures of subject matter which has meaning. They're reporters and good ones, but the great artists are able to call the world's attention to the terrible things that are going on in various wars and situations. Like Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine, they were good photographers. They were able to get laws changed and get the public's attention to what was under their very noses."

He barely pauses, "a term I hate is shooter. I don't know who started it, but I think that it's a lowering of any dignity. If we don't have any respect for ourselves and for our photographs, who else will. If you start calling yourself a shooter you're back to a 'three for five bucks, lady' type of attitude." As she does from time to time, Augusta interrupts from the other room, "you got off the track". Newman laughs, "my wife always tells me that I get off the subject."

Though I concluded that he's a warm, caring man, Newman seems to enjoy keeping people off-guard. A cat and mouse skill, useful for getting what he wants from people frequently used to getting what they want. He can seem gruff and intimidating and the next moment he's reassuring and affable.

The afternoon flies as we discuss topics of every sort, all of which he has opinions about. The interview ends and I'm preparing to head for the door when he invites me to join them for dinner. Who could decline? The three of us walk to a nearby Japanese restaurant that they frequent. Our discussions continue, but now with Augusta clarifying and adding to his remarks. Their exchanges and occasional jibes reflect the comfortable relationship built on their many years together. Obviously proud of their family and two sons, they seem to genuinely enjoy hearing about mine. As we talk, Newman occasionally interrupts to make sure that I haven't missed an attractive pedestrian outside.

He appreciates the inspiration that results when creative people work together and share ideas, feeling that knowledge and appreciation of the work of others is a fuel for growth. ASMP is a vital part of the process and he speaks proudly about his membership since 1946, sponsored by Gene Smith and Eliot Elisofon. "ASMP is trying very hard to serve the purpose that we set up; better working conditions and pay for photographers, fighting for rights in Congress. It's become what we wanted it to become, a national organization which is very healthy. All of the arts have spread out across America. ASMP reflects that. I'm astonished when I see the work being done in the chapters."

Early on he went to the ASMP meetings as much to meet fellow photographers as for the meetings themselves. Afterwards, groups would congregate in a coffee shop and "if you looked around a number of them would be people that were going down in the history books. This fellowship was marvelous. We'd talk about photography. We'd talk about the problems of working. We'd learn about other good photographers."

"When you go to a local meeting of ASMP, don't you talk to other photographers? It's all awfully important. I can't tell you how many famous photographers have called me to ask my advice and I've said, 'gee, I don't know, what have you done?' And other people I've called and we exchange ideas because we're really all working in the dark."

"There are times that conditions in the world create the atmosphere where a lot of people are doing the same things at the same time. Very often it will be the combination of people that will get together, like the impressionists, who really work together and inspire and help each other. Or the F64 Group in California. You can go on and on in the history of all creative arts. I fell under the spell of a whole bunch of people, who I'll call the Philadelphia group, which was really inspired by Brodevitch. This goes on all the time all over the world."

"Take a look at Cartier-Bresson. Who was there before him? Solomon. And who was there before Solomon? Kertesz. Everyone is one by one influenced by each other and re-influenced. I think we all work and help each other. Mondrian was an influence on me. He taught us a lot about structure."

That photographers need to know their history, is a continually surfacing theme in Newman's dialogue. He places great value in a knowledge and understanding of the past as a part of a photographer's development and style. "History should be a spring board and not an anchor, but to many people it's as though if they do something different, then they'll get the attention. The trouble is that if they don't know history how will they know what's different." Many people in the business "can't tell you who Cartier Bresson or Charles Sheeler or Gene Smith are. They only know who did the latest car ad."

"You can fake style to an extent, but then it's only going to be an imitation of something, if you aren't inventive enough. Style is a result, not a name. Eventually even those with little talent will develop a style, which most of the time is the influence of someone else because they don't have the imagination. There are those people that can create and add to our knowledge and those that take our knowledge and make it work."

"I heard David Bailey talking about some of the Italian primitive paintings from several centuries ago and I sat up. This guy knew his art history and knew his photography history. He wasn't repeating it. He wasn't faking it as he went along. He knew what the hell he was doing. He was free by knowledge, not by indifference to the past."

As we part for the evening, Newman reverses himself and agrees to allow me to do a portrait to accompany the article. The next day I report back to his studio and start to evaluate settings. My preconceptions of him in his studio are immediately wasted. The studio has hundreds of prints spread out everywhere in preparation for his upcoming show. A small upstairs window, looking out from his office appears to have possibilities. White pipes against white walls and trim.... Newman leans out the window, "don't ask me to pose in this window. Every student that comes in here wants to photograph me in this window."

Eventually I decide to place him among a number of panels propped in a corner. After borrowing his tripod, I load a roll of film into my auto-focus camera, discreetly set the controls for full manual operation and whap, whap, whap.

Afterwards he invites me to his home for a drink. The Newmans' appreciation of art is apparent in their apartment; a veritable gallery with original works by an incredible array of famous and not-so-famous creators. The collection is primarily the result of trading he's done over the years with his subjects and includes many photographs. He notes with some amusement that "I rarely find bad photographers collecting other people's work. I find mostly good painters and good artists collecting other people's work. Their minds aren't so narrowed. Many people are so with it that they just can't see other people's styles."

When asked about his favorite aspect of photography, Newman responds, "making photographs that satisfy me. I went into it because I began to love it. The greatest satisfaction is saying, 'gee, I can still do it'."

"I have to give a talk this summer on why are we in photography? How many people really ask themselves that? If somebody said, 'I'll offer you this shoestore. You can make twice or three times as much'. Would you do it? To me that's the essence, would you do anything else if you could make more money. That's important. If you love it enough, you want to learn something about it. That's what it's all about, ideas and love."