Diane Arbus

American, 1923 - 1971

(not assigned)USA

SchoolPhotography

BiographyAmerican photographer. Arbus was educated at the Ethical Culture School and Fieldston School until 1940. In 1940 she married Allan Arbus with whom she formed a successful partnership in fashion photography. She studied photography with Alexey Brodovitch c. 1954 and with Lisette Model c. 1955–7. Model encouraged Arbus as an artist and particularly as a maker of powerfully individualistic portraits. In 1963 Arbus visited a nudist camp for the first time. Retired Man and his Wife at Home in a Nudist Camp One Morning, NJ (1963; see Arbus and Israel, 1972, p. 27) juxtaposes the domestic, furnished environment with a middle-aged couple whose only clothing is their footwear, enhancing the overall air of incongruity.

In 1963 and 1966 Arbus received Guggenheim fellowships for a project entitled ‘American Rites, Manners, and Customs’. A group of images from this work was featured in the exhibition of 1967 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, entitled New Documents, alongside work by Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand.

Arbus’s apparent interest in what the exhibition curator, John Szarkowski, referred to as society’s ‘frailties’ aroused great controversy and debate. Some saw her as characterizing to perfection the disinterested, amoral voyeur potentially lurking in every photographer, taking pictures of, for example, transvestites, as in Young Man with Curlers at Home on West 20th Street, New York City (1966; see Arbus and Israel, 1972, p. 21). Others lauded her for her psychological authenticity, her evident empathy with disadvantaged subjects, such as the mentally handicapped, in the Untitled series (1970–71; see Arbus and Israel, 1972, pp. 165–74). Arbus was troubled by the notoriety her work achieved. She often felt that her imagery was misunderstood, excessively praised or vilified.

A very successful posthumous retrospective (New York, MOMA) confirmed Arbus’s reputation as one of the most important photographers of the 1960s. Not only did her work extend notions of acceptable subject-matter and violate canons of ‘decent’ distance between photographer and subject, but it was also characterized by a psychological intensity rare in photographic portraiture and an obvious awareness of the photographer on the part of the subject.

Arbus exemplified clearly the shift during the 1960s from objectivity to subjectivity in documentary photography. Her portraits are an exposition of her personal fascination with American mores as seen through outsiders such as dwarfs, giants, twins and the elderly. Arbus did exploit her subjects in that she used them as metaphors of her own sense of what it was to be an individual, but her self-searching was not mere self-indulgence; her cri de coeur was a collective one that encompassed not only the stigmatized members of society but also the ‘normal’.

Although Arbus captured an emotional rawness and undoubted aggression in her work, she was a highly intelligent photographer. Subtleties and sly ironies appear in works such as House on a Hill, Hollywood, CA (1963; see Arbus and Israel, 1972, p. 163), in which an elegant, abandoned false mansion front is seen in an overgrown setting. There is an ineffable sense of falling short in life and in society too—the grim gap between what is given and what is intended.

In her dark and compelling works Arbus created a memorable gallery of American characters, perhaps perverse but certainly not perverted. On a much narrower yet comparably intense scale, her imagery echoes August Sander’s epic characterization of Weimar Germany. Arbus was dealing primarily with a psychological rather than overtly societal profile. Nevertheless, she encapsulated a remarkably vivid sense of the Zeitgeist of the 1960s.

Person TypeIndividual

Terms