In 1938, Arnold Newman had just dropped out of college and was making 49-cent portraits at a commercial studio in Philadelphia. Ten years later, he was photographing the biggest names of the century. Newman maintained that the composition and background of a portrait were just as important, if not more important, than the subject itself—no matter if it was Pablo Picasso or Marilyn Monroe. This principle was termed “environmental portraiture.” In Newman’s portrait of Igor Stravinsky, for example, that meant making the composer’s grand piano the key focus. In an early portrait of John F. Kennedy, the young senator is framed by the towering columns of the Capitol. Newman died in 2006, at age 88. The 200 prints in this exhibition represent six-plus decades of vision. —Paulina Prosnitz