Windy Day

Newman made this picture in Chicago during the winter of 1951, angling his camera downward on the elongated cast shadow of an anonymous woman shopper as she walked toward him; he then rotated the resulting print 180° so that the figure stood upright. These photographs were made as part of the artist's master's thesis at Chicago's Institute of Design, founded by the expatriate Moholy-Nagy in 1937 to propagate the experimental breakthroughs of the "New Vision" aesthetic: unusual viewpoints, photograms, multiple exposures, solarization, and photomontage. Newman's "Shadow" pictures have not only the graphic power and taut construction of the work of his professors Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan, but also some of the gritty urbanism of the period's great painters such as Franz Kline and Willem De Kooning.