Diane Arbus was an American photographer known for her hand-held black and white images of marginalized people such as midgets, circus freaks, giants, transgenders, as well as more normalized subjects of suburban families, celebrities, and nudists. Arbus' work can be understood as bizarre, fantastical, and psychologically complex all at once - either way, she took documentary photography a step further.
Background
Arbus was born Diane Nemerov to David Nemerov and Gertrude Russek Nemerov, a Jewish couple who lived in New York City and owned Russek's, a famous Fifth Avenue department store. Because of her family's wealth, Arbus was insulated from the effects of the Great Depression while growing up in the 1930s.
Arbus's parents were not deeply involved in parenting their children. She and her siblings were raised by maids and governesses while her mother suffered from depression and her father was busy with work. She separated herself from her family and her lavish childhood.
Education
Arbus attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, a prep school. With the encouragement of her father, Arbus took up painting around 1934. Though she continued to study art through summer programs, she never went to college.
Career
Arbus received her first camera, a Graflex, from Allan shortly after they married. Shortly thereafter, she enrolled in classes with photographer Berenice Abbott. The Arbuses' interests in photography led them, in 1941, to visit the gallery of Alfred Stieglitz, and learn about the photographers Mathew Brady, Timothy O'Sullivan, Paul Strand, Bill Brandt, and Eugène Atget.
In the early 1940s, Diane's father employed them to take photographs for the department store's advertisements. Allan was a photographer for the U.S. Army Signal Corps in World War Two.
In 1946, after the war, the Arbuses began a commercial photography business called "Diane & Allan Arbus," with Diane as art director and Allan as the photographer. She would come up with the concepts for their shoots and then take care of the models. She grew dissatisfied with this role, a role even her husband thought was "demeaning." They contributed to Glamour, Seventeen, Vogue, and other magazines even though "they both hated the fashion world." Despite over 200 pages of their fashion editorial in Glamour, and over 80 pages in Vogue, the Arbuses' fashion photography has been described as of "middling quality." Edward Steichen's noted 1955 photography exhibition, The Family of Man, did include a photograph by the Arbuses of a father and son reading a newspaper.
Arbus studied briefly with Alexey Brodovich in 1954.However, it was her studies with Lisette Model, which began in 1956, that encouraged Arbus to focus exclusively on her own work.That year Arbus quit the commercial photography business and began numbering her negatives.
By 1956 she was working with a 35mm Nikon, wandering the streets of New York City and meeting her subjects largely, though not always, by chance. A few years later, in 1958 she began making lists of who and what she was interested in photographing. She began photographing on assignment for magazines such as Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, and The Sunday Times Magazine in 1959.
Around 1962, Arbus switched from a 35mm Nikon camera which produced the grainy rectangular images characteristic of her post-studio work to a twin-lens reflex Rolleiflex camera which produced more detailed square images.
In 1963, Arbus was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for a project on "American rites, manners, and customs", the fellowship was renewed in 1966.
Throughout the 1960s, Arbus supported herself largely by taking magazine assignments and commissions. For example, in 1968 she shot documentary photographs of poor sharecroppers in rural South Carolina (for Esquire magazine). In 1969 a rich and prominent actor and theater owner, Konrad Matthaei, and his wife, Gay, commissioned Arbus to photograph a family Christmas gathering.
During her career, Arbus photographed Mae West, Ozzie Nelson and Harriet Nelson, Bennet Cerf, atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair, Norman Mailer, Jane Mansfield, Eugene McCarthy, billionaire H. L. Hunt, Gloria Vanderbilt's baby, Anderson Cooper, Coretta Scott King, and Marguerite Oswald (Lee Harvey Oswald's mother). In general, her magazine assignments decreased as her fame as an artist increased. Szarkowski hired Arbus in 1970 to research an exhibition on photojournalism called "From the Picture Press"; it included many photographs by Weegee whose work Arbus admired. She also taught photography at the Parsons School of Design and the Cooper Union in New York City, and the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island.
Late in her career, The Metropolitan Museum of Art indicated to her that they would buy three of her photographs for $75 each, but citing a lack of funds, purchased only two.
Arbus experienced "depressive episodes" during her life similar to those experienced by her mother, and the episodes may have been made worse by symptoms of hepatitis. Her ex-husband once noted that she had "violent changes of mood." On July 26, 1971, while living at Westbeth Artists Community in New York City, Arbus took her own life by ingesting barbiturates and slashing her wrists with a razor. She wrote the words "Last Supper" in her diary and placed her appointment book on the stairs leading up to the bathroom. Marvin Israel found her body in the bathtub two days later; she was 48 years old.
Achievements
The first major exhibition of her photographs occurred at the Museum of Modern Art in the influential New Documents (1967) alongside the work of Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, curated by John Szarkowski. New Documents, which drew almost 250,000 visitors demonstrated Arbus’s interest in what Szarkowski referred to as society’s “frailties” and presented what he described as "a new generation of documentary photographers...whose aim has been not to reform life but to know it," described elsewhere as "photography that emphasized the pathos and conflicts of modern life presented without editorializing or sentimentalizing but with a critical, observant eye." The show was polarizing, receiving both praise and criticism, with some identifying Arbus as a disinterested voyeur and others praising her for her evident empathy with her subjects.
The work of Diane Arbus has been the subject of more than twenty-five major solo exhibitions, eight authorized publications, and countless critical articles.
In 1972, Arbus was the first photographer to be included in the Venice Biennale; her photographs were described as "the overwhelming sensation of the American Pavilion" and "an extraordinary achievement."
Between 2003 and 2006, Arbus and her work were the subject of another major traveling exhibition, Diane Arbus Revelations, which was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Accompanied by a book of the same name, the exhibition included artifacts such as correspondence, books, and cameras as well as 180 photographs by Arbus.
In 2006, the fictional film Fur: an Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus was released, starring Nicole Kidman as Arbus.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased twenty of Arbus's photographs (valued at millions of dollars) and received Arbus's archives, which included hundreds of early and unique photographs and negatives and contact prints of 7500 rolls of film, as a gift from her estate in 2007.
In 2018, The New York Times published a belated obituary of Arbus as part of the Overlooked history project.
A young man in curlers at home on West 20th St., N.Y.C.
1966
Photograph
Photograph
Identical Twins
1967
Teenage couple on Hudson Street, N.Y.C.
1963
Girl in a Swimming Cap
Susan Sontag and her son on bench, N.Y.C.
1965
Masked woman in a wheelchair
1970
The Vampire's Wife
The photographer encountered this young woman holding a kitten quite by chance
1960
Kenneth Baker of the San Francisco Chronicle reviews
Lady on a bus
Mae West on bed
1965
Triplets in their Bedroom
1963
Photograph
Photograph
Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park
1962
Views
Arbus employed the techniques of documentary or photojournalistic photography to represent real life subjects in their natural environments. However, she made the resulting works uniquely her own, as her personal journey was always embedded in the imagery she photographed. Arbus found intrigue and conjured beauty in unlikely subjects, and made remarkable portraits of people that were not often deemed "fit" to be in front of the lens of a camera. She sought out unique characters on the fringes of society for her work.
The idea of personal identity as socially constructed is one that Arbus came back to, whether it be performers, women and men wearing makeup, or a literal mask obstructing one's face. Critics have speculated that the choices in her subjects were a reflection of her own identity issues, for she said that the only thing she suffered from as a child was never having felt adversity. This evolved into a longing for things that money couldn't buy such as experiences in the underground social world.
Quotations:
"A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know."
"My favorite thing is to go where I've never been."
"Our whole guise is like giving a sign to the world to think of us in a certain way, but there's a point between what you want people to know about you and what you can't help people knowing about you. And that has to do with what I've always called the gap between intention and effect."
"Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot....There's a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats."
"I do feel I have some slight corner on something about the quality of things. I mean it's very subtle and a little embarrassing to me, but I believe there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them."
"It's always seemed to me that photography tends to deal with facts whereas film tends to deal with fiction. The best example I know is when you go to the movies and you see two people in bed, you're willing to put aside the fact that you perfectly well know that there was a director and a cameraman and assorted lighting people all in that same room and the two people in bed weren't really alone. But when you look at a photograph, you can never put that aside."
"I never have taken a picture I've intended. They're always better or worse."
"I work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don't like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself."
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Photographer Joel Meyerowitz told the journalist, Arthur Lubow: "If she was doing the kind of work she was doing and photography wasn’t enough to keep her alive, what hope did we have?"
The art critic Robert Hughes in a November 1972 issue of Time magazine: "[Arbus's] work has had such an influence on other photographers that it is already hard to remember how original it was."
Connections
In 1941, at the age of 18, she married her childhood sweetheart, Allan Arbus, whom she had dated since age 14. After they married, Allan became an actor. He is popularly known for his role as Dr. Sydney Freedman on M*A*S*H. Their first daughter, Doon, who would become a writer, was born in 1945. Their second daughter, Amy, who would become a photographer, was born in 1954.
Arbus and her husband worked together from 1946 to 1956. Allan was very supportive of her, even after she quit commercial photography and began developing an independent relationship to photography.
Arbus and her husband separated in 1959. They maintained a close friendship after their separation and the family met regularly for Sunday breakfasts. Although Arbus made her own prints, under Allan's supervision his studio assistants processed her negatives. The couple divorced in 1969 when he moved to California to pursue acting.
In late 1959 Arbus began a relationship with the art director and painter Marvin Israel that would last until the time of her death. All the while, he remained married to Margaret Ponce Israel, an accomplished mixed-media artist. Marvin Israel both spurred Arbus' creatively and championed her work. He was the one to encourage her to create her first portfolio.
Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph: Fortieth-Anniversary Edition
When Diane Arbus died in 1971 at the age of 48, she was already a significant influence - even something of a legend - for serious photographers, although only a relatively small number of her most important pictures were widely known at the time. The publication of Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph in 1972 - along with the posthumous retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art - offered the general public its first encounter with the breadth and power of her achievements.
Diane Arbus: Untitled
Untitled is the third volume of Diane Arbus’s work and the only one devoted exclusively to a single project. The photographs were taken at residences for the mentally retarded between 1969 and 1971, in the last years of Arbus’s life. Although she considered doing a book on the subject, the vast majority of these pictures remained unpublished prior to this volume. These photographs achieve a lyricism, an emotional purity that sets them apart from all her other accomplishments.
Diane Arbus: A Biography
A spellbinding portrait of the tumultuous life and artistic career of one of the most creative photographers of the 1960s (New York magazine).
