Portrait photographer remembered for his street work

Bottom line: A fine opportunity to view vintage and modern prints of little-known work —- street still lifes —- by the portrait photographer Arnold Newman.

Known primarily as a portrait photographer famous for his "environmental portraits" of artists and society luminaries, in his early years Arnold Newman (1918-2006) also created a large body of photography of a more private nature.

These are mostly outdoor still-life images, formalist studies of light, shadow and textures, many devoid of people. They demonstrate Newman's understanding of the most advanced European and American techniques as he trained his eye outside the studio.

Recently, "Arnold Newman: The Early Work" (Steidl), which features these images, was published. To celebrate, Lumiere Gallery has mounted a show, the first dedicated to Newman's early work outside New York.

Forced to find employment after high school during the Depression, Newman took a job in a photography studio, learning the trade he would make his life's work. Later, moving between Baltimore, Philadelphia and West Palm Beach, he took his medium-format camera and tripod into forgotten neighborhoods.

The results, collected in this exhibition, suggest that Newman had more on his mind than social documentation, a resonant theme of much urban photography of the era. He had absorbed lessons from avant garde painting as well as photography.

"Violin Maker's Patterns" (Philadelphia, 1941) takes up one of the French modernists' favorite subjects. For both Cubists and the Surrealists, the sinuous forms of the violin invoked the female form, and here Newman plays with positive and negative, collage and texture in a beautifully printed, sophisticated composition.

In another image, "Chairs on Porch" (West Palm Beach, 1941), Newman harnesses the sunlight and shadows into a meditation on form and structure as only photography can. Shadows cast from the vertical porch balustrade onto the clapboard wall of the house establish a relationship between the solid wooden posts and elusive shadows, bringing the two in equal balance.

To put Newman's work in context, the show pulls in portrait and street work by other photographers working at the same time, including John Gutmann, Paul Strand and Helen Levitt. While Newman made social pictures too, these are his most derivative works.

The final gallery includes some of his wonderful portraits, including those of Frank Stella and Marilyn Monroe.

Ultimately, though, a smaller show concentrating just on Newman's less well-known early experiments would have been better.