Roving eye

Photography has many genres, even more than painting, and most photographers achieve fame by focusing on one of them. There are technical reasons for this. Armed only with a bunch of brushes and a palette of colours, a painter can achieve a variety of effects — close-up, distance, soft or sharp focus, motion — for which a photographer needs a battery of cameras and associated paraphernalia in the form of lenses, films, lights and filters, and the technical know-how to get the best out of each.

There is also professional snobbery. Jobbing photographers who work across genres for magazine assignments are less likely to be taken seriously as artists. The distinction may be artificial (pun intended) but it exists, and it explains why New York photographer Marvin E. Newman has had to wait until the age of 89 for a monograph on his work to be published by Taschen.

‘Chicago’, 1951, by Marvin E. Newman

Social documentary, travel, fashion, sport, even the funeral of JFK — Newman has shot them all through every sort of lens with every conceivable combination of film, flashbulb and filter. When I naively inquire, as a technopagan more used to interviewing painters, how he got that deliciously lurid green wash on his 1983 series of night scenes of Broadway, he replies: ‘You don’t get it, it’s what exists,’ before patiently explaining how different light sources have different colour temperatures and using tungsten film with the fluorescent lights of the theatre marquees brings out that green.

Oh, I see.

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’42nd Street’, 1983, by Marvin E. Newman

It works magic on the silver bodywork of the Bentley cruising slummingly along 42nd Street past a cinema advertising porno-horror ‘MAKE THEM DIE SLOWLY’ with the teaser ‘To [sic] disgusting to watch! To [sic] bizarre to resist!’ In the back of the car, a passenger with a camera snaps the photographer.