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.”

Newman, who died in 2023 aged 95, never recognised the difference between artist and photojournalist. “I wanted to change the world with my photographs – show the well-off the underclass – where they lived, how they lived, what they did,” he once told the Guardian. Within that ambition, he found ways to elevate intimate moments of street life and invest them with lasting drama. “When photography works well,” he said, “you can go inside the psyche of the people in the picture. You can see beyond the moment.”

• Marvin E Newman: Photographs 1949-1983 is published by Taschen