A retrospective of the work of the prolific US street photographer reveals a singular gift for investing everyday moments with lasting drama

Marvin E Newman, the son of a family of bakers from the Bronx, New York, had dreams of being a painter or a sculptor. After hitchhiking to art school in Chicago after the second world war he found a different way to express that ambition: he became a celebrated photographer during the golden age of American magazines, among the first to understand the possibilities of colour for publications that included Sports Illustrated and Esquire .

This study of women working at a drive-thru corn dog stand on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles was part of a series about California commissioned by Time/Life in 1966. The image, included in a new retrospective collection of Newman’s vast canon of work, is a classic example of his gift for framing American street life: witness the palm tree reflection that creates a Statue of Liberty crown around the head of the woman on the right – itself cast against the skyline of the Hollywood hills. Newman’s California pictures seem to demand a caption from Joan Didion’s great essay on the state, also published in 1966, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream”: “Here,” wrote Didion, “is the last stop for all those … who drifted away from … the old ways… they are trying to find a new life style, trying to find it in the only places they know to look: the movies and the newspapers.”