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
Diane Nemerov grew up in New York City in a wealthy Jewish family who owned a successful fur company named Russeks. She was the second of three children who all grew-up to be creatives. (Howard, the eldest, grew up to be a Pulitzer Prize winning poet and the younger, Renee became an artist). Raised in a series of lavish homes in Upper East Side of New York City, her childhood consisted of maids and governesses helping raise her and her siblings. Diane's mother, Gertrude, struggled with bouts of depression preventing her from intellectually supporting Diane while her father, David, stayed busy with work. The rest of her life, she would try separating herself from her family and upbringing. Many have thought that she did this through her work, as an extension of her personal suffering, for she felt oppressed in her own community and felt akin to her subjects as a social outcast.
Education
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.
In 1941, David Nemerov hired Allan and Diane to photograph models for Russek's newspaper advertisements. Diane took to designing and styling the fashion models, while Allan photographed the models and perfected the photos in the dark room. Shortly after, they began publishing with major fashion publications such as, Vogue, Glamour, and Harper's Bazaar, which placed the Arbus' among the likes of other noted names in fashion photography such as Richard Avedon and Irving Penn.
As fashion photographers, Diane and Allan were constantly looking for new assignments, generating ideas for magazines, and traveling. Diane longed to photograph on her own terms, not just to work as a glorified stylist. Furthermore, the fact that her ideas dictated many of the photographs that made the magazine spreads endowed her with the courage to move away from fashion to find a new purpose.
After giving birth to their second daughter Amy in 1954, Arbus began studying alongside American photographer Lisette Model in 1956. Emerging as a dedicated and inspired photographer, she commenced the new chapter in her life that also meant ending her involvement with her and Allan's photography firm. For the first time, Arbus began numbering her negatives, which is a method she continued for the rest of her career. Most importantly, she started recording appointments, meetings, and ideas for prospective projects, along with quotations, bits of conversations, and books that appealed to her.
In 1959 when Allan and Diane separated, she found a renewed sense of purpose for her personal work. She cut down her hair, transformed her apartment into a working space filled with photos pinned up on the walls, and slept on a mattress situated on the floor. Arbus scraped together a living for herself and her two daughters through commercial work with magazines. Most notably she worked for Esquire Magazine, which sought to publish "new journalism" which employed literary techniques to enhance reporting, and gave her a unique opportunity that helped develop her artistic voice.
She improvised childcare through the help of friends and family and started life as a working artist. Allan continued working as a fashion photographer, making the firm's darkroom available to Arbus and assisting her with technical matters. Photography allowed her transformation from an uptown, private-school-educated wife with a coy personality into someone who longed for an artistic voice independent from her bourgeois upbringing. She felt akin to the underrepresented and gravitated toward subjects that allowed a morbid fascination by merely looking.
She frequented Hubert's Museum freak shows, investigated body builder competitions, beauty contests, and youth gang meetings, which are all events where voyeurism is encouraged. Hubert's was located in Times Square, which was a seedy epicenter of hedonism; an area not often frequented by women. This live show was open from 1925 - 1969 and for 25 cents one could gaze upon human oddities, such as the bearded lady, or Zip the human pinhead, as well as performers such as sword swallowers and snake charmers. This show was a safe space for one to gaze upon unique humans, and gave Arbus a taste of where her interests were to develop. She later approached subjects independently and sought out those who live on the margins of society, those that are often thought of as grotesque.
Her findings eventually led her to receive a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation to photograph "American Rites, Manners, and Customs" in 1963. This opened up doors for Arbus, and she was awarded a renewal for the Guggenheim grant in 1965, and again in 1966.
Her magazine projects and personal projects overlapped and merged, sometimes evolving into and out of one another. Marvin Israel, a lover and fellow product of an upper-class Jewish family in New York inspired Arbus to do some of her best work. Israel is also accredited for encouraging and shaping Richard Avedon's best work, among many other modern photographers of that era. He was her intellectual equal and the two shared much in common, but Israel refused to leave his wife for Arbus.
She was excited to receive the validation in 1967 with her first museum exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art alongside Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand. The exhibition entitled, New Documents, featured her ceremony photographs, street photography, and candid portraits. Arbus, conscious of the fact that her photos were different from Winogrand and Friedlander, had reservations about showing her photos, about being presented at the right time in the right way.
Winogrand and Friedlander are both documentary street photographers, chasing the decisive moment. Arbus approached her subjects differently, and sought aspects of an unrevealed truth that is often ignored by everyday society. This show had dramatically shaped the reception of photography, for it was elevated on the level of fine art; something documentary photography had not done previously. MoMA influenced this through exhibitions and publications and sought to push the expectations of art practice, which is still part of their mission statement today.
Around 1968, it became evident to Arbus that she would need other sources of income beyond photographic journalism to sustain herself. Her magazine publications dwindled as her work appeared less imaginative. To earn more money, she reluctantly began teaching college photography courses at Parsons and at Cooper Union and later gave a master class at her home in Westbeth. At this same time, she also grew restless of her camera materials and often wrote about losing her fondness of flash photography that once amazed her.
Arbus's grew increasingly unhealthy in the period following 1968. Her diagnoses of depression and Hepatitis B caused unwanted weight loss and a feeling of constant fatigue. Allan and Diane, though separated since 1959, finally divorced in 1969. Allan moved to California creating an even more unstable atmosphere for Diane.
Soon she transferred all her emotional weight to Israel and developed a malign envy for his wife. Many of Arbus's friends and colleagues noticed her exaggerated mood swings. Her negative reaction towards many of her prescribed medications prevented her mental state from improving. Once again, money was an issue too. She declined an invitation by Walker Evans to teach a photography class at Yale since her depression made her incapable of carrying out the course and other strenuous commitments.
In the last two years of her life, she gained access to a home for the mentally handicapped in Vineland, New Jersey and photographed the residents on multiple occasions. She originally wanted to produce a book on this singular subject, which is something she had not done previously. The images were not exhibited during her lifetime, however a book was published in 1995 titled "Untitled" that consisted of 51 images and was published posthumously by her daughter Doon in conjunction with the Aperture Foundation.
In early 1971, she told her friends that photography no longer met her needs of fulfillment. Arbus grew to despise the pictures she took of the patients in New Jersey that she vehemently sought to capture for so many years. On July 26, 1971 Israel found Arbus after she committed suicide in her Greenwich Village apartment by ingesting lethal sedatives and cutting her wrists.
A young man in curlers at home on West 20th Street
Child Crying
Bishop at the altar
Identical Twins
Albino Sword Swallower at a Carnival
Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park
Patriotic Young Man with a Flag
Untitled
A Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx
A Young Waitress at a Nudist Camp
Ruth St. Denis
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:
"I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them."
Personality
Diane Arbus was very public about her feelings of being a social outcast within her own community, and sought solace in her subjects on the fringe. In turn, she channeled her frustration and by extension, her outsider feelings, into her work and sought out the eccentric. Her adventurousness and curious mentality craved variety and newness to stave off feelings of restlessness and boredom. She once complained to a friend that, "she was untouched by the ordinary joys and pains that make people feel alive."
Interests
myths, rituals, and public spectacle
Connections
In 1941, at the age of 18, Diane Arbus married her childhood sweetheart, Allan Arbus, whom she had dated since age 14. 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. After long hours in the studio, she would rush home to cook dinner for Allan and their two daughters. Allan was very supportive of her, even after she quit commercial photography and began developing an independent relationship to photography.
Arbus and her hushand separated in 1959 and were divorced in 1969. However, they still remained close because of their daughters. Allan would come over for Sunday breakfast, and he continued to develop her film. Arbus began a relationship with the art director and painter Marvin Israel that would last roughly ten years, until the time of her death. He was married and made clear to Arbus that he was never going to leave his wife. He pushed Arbus very hard regarding her work. He was the one to encourage her to create her first portfolio.