I have been thinking about photographic portraits that do not present their subjects as beautiful today and the single portrait that keeps coming back to me is Arnold Newman’s portrait of Alfred Krupp, a former Nazi slave labor boss. Newman absolutely hated Krupp and understandably so, but he was commissioned to make his portrait in 1963.

As the story goes (according to my good friend and former Newman assistant Ralph Smith), upon finding out that Newman was a Jew, after being assigned make his portrait, Krupp refused to let him make the photograph. Newman insisted to have Krupp look at his portfolio before making a final decision and after seeing Newman’s portfolio Krupp accepted. Arnold Newman then decided to make Krupp look as evil as possible, and the results are just that. Apparently, after the photo shoot when Krupp first saw the portrait he was livid, and you can see why.

I find this photograph to be amazing in that it purposely used horrible lighting and color to make Krupp completely unattractive. There is really nothing that I find beautiful about the image, but yet it is still wildly successful and captivating.

In a way, I want to see more photographs taken today with this kind of passion. I’m not saying that some of the beautiful portraits that I often see in contemporary art today are not taken with passion, but I am suggesting that there is not a lot of daring use of color and light to successfully cary out such strong feelings towards a subject in a photograph.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 6:27 pm and is filed under Beauty, By Ethan, Photographers, Portraits, Posts with pictures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.