Photographers have to earn a living, and one of the tests of their commitment to their art is how far they will stray from their ideals to pay the rent. “Marvin E. Newman: The Color Series,” at Silverstein Photography through May 24, presents the work of an artist who was fortunate to have studied early on with some of the great photographers of the mid-century, who absorbed their aesthetic and social ideals, and who has drawn on their teachings throughout a long and successful career. Silverstein’s second exhibition of Mr. Newman’s work is mostly concerned with his color photography, much of it from the 1950s, when color was still pretty much a novelty.

Mr. Newman was born in New York in 1927, and first studied photography as an undergraduate at Brooklyn College in the mid-1940s. The design department at Brooklyn was one of the American institutions that inherited Bauhaus faculty who had fled Nazi Germany, and in addition to them Mr. Newman studied with abstractionist Burgoyne Diller and photographer Walter Rosenblum. Rosenblum (1919-2000) was an important figure in the Photo League, which Mr. Newman joined in 1948. The Photo League’s twin commitments to high artistic standards and social activism were exemplified in the street photography at which Mr. Newman came to excel. He hitchhiked to Chicago where in 1952 he became one of the first students to earn a master of science degree in photography from the Institute of Design; there he was influenced by László Moholy-Nagy, Aaron Siskin, and Harry Callahan. As fortunate as he was in his teachers, he distinguished himself with his tireless efforts to master the medium.

A generous selection of early black-and-white pictures in the back room at Silverstein clearly shows the lessons that the young Newman absorbed. “Spaghetti,” “Windows Looking Up,” and “Three Cars Looking Down” (all 1949) are Bauhausian. “Untitled (Four black boys on sidewalk)” (1950) is vintage Photo League street photography. The earliest color photos in the main body of the exhibition are four nighttime pictures from 1952 of the San Gennaro Festival in Greenwich Village, an archetypal street event onto which Mr. Newman has imposed a strong sense of design. The illuminated arches — red, white, green, blue — become progressively smaller as they parade down the street in an overhead shot, “San Gennaro Festival I.” In “Festival II” it is the distribution of the light from the arches on the faces of the fairgoers that creates a pattern. In “Festival IV,” a concession worker shot in profile is dramatically backlit by naked bulbs.

Times Square provided Mr. Newman an opportunity for street photography far removed from the stoops of Harlem. In six pictures from 1954 titled “Broadway,” his attention alternates between its bright lights and its habitués. “Broadway I” features “Ham n Egg” in neon, the illuminated marquee of Roseland, and light reflected off the roofs of cars in traffic. The lights of signs for Coca-Cola and Whelan Drugs are in the background of “Broadway VI,” but the profile of a young woman alone in the passenger seat of a car is the focus of interest; her eyebrow is as sleek and as black as the roof of the car she sits in.

Two years later, a series of images from Wall Street seems heavily influenced by Paul Strand’s 1915 picture from the same venue. Isolated individuals raked by bright sunlight step into impenetrably dark areas of shadow. Strand also taught at the Photo League.

By 1971, when he took the 11 pictures on display of Mustang Ranch, a legal whorehouse in Nevada, Mr. Newman was a practiced photojournalist whose work regularly appeared in Sports Illustrated, Life, Look, Newsweek, and elsewhere. His use of color here is habitually effective, but not as likely to call attention to itself. “Prostitutes I” is a calendar page from the month of April, hand-drawn on white paper, with the women’s names written on it in red, green, and purple inks. It is tacked to a wall of fake wood paneling, and, with its ersatz grain pattern, the paneling provides most of the color. The straightforward shot of the calendar is a heritage of Mr. Newman’s training in design, to which the simple use of color adds an awful verisimilitude.

In “Prostitutes X,” an attractive brunette in a peekaboo nightie leans against an open door covered with a fraying, cheap veneer. Inside her room we see a poster on the wall with a yellow sun in a red sky, an electric blue towel on the bed, and the same fake paneling lit by a naked bulb on the ceiling. In spite of her Playboy figure and visible nipples, the woman is not erotic. Her pretty face is shaded, and she stares coldly at the photographer. Lewis Hines, famous for his work documenting child labor in the early 20th century, was another photographer associated with the Photo League, and this sad picture seems part of that same genre.

Three decades after the “Broadway” pictures, Mr. Newman returned to Times Square. The photographs are more assured. “42nd Street I” (1983) features a bearded bus driver seen casually through the random bedlam of signs reflected on his windshield. “42nd Street V” shows a couple simply framed by the windshield of their pale blue sedan. A little boot dangles from the rearview mirror. The driver has one of his hands around the woman’s neck and another on her breast; she has a toothy open-mouthed smile. The same blue-green color of his shirt is picked up in her eye shadow, in his shiny black hair, and on the roof of the car. Mr. Newman is again shooting street photography here, but it is a different era, and he is still learning.

Until May 24 (535 W. 24th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-627-3930).