Diane Arbus (; née Nemerov; March 14, 1923 – July 26, 1971) was an American photographer. She photographed a wide range of subjects including strippers, carnival performers, nudists, people with dwarfism, children, mothers, couples, elderly people, and middle-class families. She photographed her subjects in familiar settings: their homes, on the street, in the workplace, in the park. "She is noted for expanding notions of acceptable subject matter and violates canons of the appropriate distance between photographer and subject. By befriending, not objectifying her subjects, she was able to capture in her work a rare psychological intensity."
In his 2003 New York Times Magazine article, "Arbus Reconsidered", Arthur Lubow states, "She was fascinated by people who were visibly creating their own identities—cross-dressers, nudists, sideshow performers, tattooed men, the nouveaux riches, the movie-star fans—and by those who were trapped in a uniform that no longer provided any security or comfort." Michael Kimmelman writes in his review of the exhibition Diane Arbus Revelations, that her work "transformed the art of photography (Arbus is everywhere, for better and worse, in the work of artists today who make photographs)".
In her lifetime she achieved some recognition and renown with the publication, beginning in 1960, of photographs in such magazines as Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, London's Sunday Times Magazine, and Artforum. In 1963 the Guggenheim Foundation awarded Arbus a fellowship for her proposal entitled, "American Rites, Manners and Customs". She was awarded a renewal of her fellowship in 1966. John Szarkowski, the director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City from 1962 to 1991, championed her work and included it in his 1967 exhibit New Documents along with the work of Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand. Her photographs were also included in a number of other major group shows.
In 1972, a year after her suicide, Arbus became the first photographer to be included in the Venice Biennale where her photographs were "the overwhelming sensation of the American Pavilion" and "extremely powerful and very strange".
The first major retrospective of Arbus's work was held in 1972 at MoMA, organized by Szarkowski. The retrospective garnered the highest attendance of any exhibition in MoMA's history to date. Millions viewed traveling exhibitions of her work from 1972 to 1979. The book accompanying the exhibition, Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph, edited by Doon Arbus and Marvin Israel and first published in 1972, has never been out of print.
Contents
Early life and education
Arbus was born Diane Nemerov to David Nemerov and Gertrude Russek Nemerov, Jewish immigrants from Soviet Russia and Poland, who lived in New York City. They owned Russeks, a Fifth Avenue women's wear department store, co-founded by Arbus's grandfather Frank Russek, a Polish-Jewish immigrant to the United States. David rose to become chairman of the store. Because of her family's wealth, Arbus was insulated from the effects of the Great Depression while growing up in the 1930s. Her father became a painter after retiring from Russeks. Her younger sister became a sculptor and designer, and her older brother, the poet Howard Nemerov, taught English at Washington University in St. Louis and was appointed United States Poet Laureate. Howard's son is the Americanist art historian Alexander Nemerov.
Arbus's parents were not deeply involved in raising their children, who were overseen by maids and governesses. Her mother had a busy social life and underwent a period of clinical depression for approximately a year, then recovered, and her father was busy with work. Diane separated herself from her family and her lavish childhood.
Arbus attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, a college-preparatory school.
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 Diane and Allan to take photographs for the department store's advertisements. Allan was a photographer for the U.S. Army Signal Corps in World War II.
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.
She 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. (Her last known negative was labeled #7459.) Based on Model's advice, Arbus spent time with an empty camera so she could practice observation. Arbus also credits Model with making it clear to her that "the more specific you are, the more general it'll be."
By 1956 she worked with a 35mm Nikon, wandering the streets of New York City and meeting her subjects largely, though not always, by chance. 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 reflected 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. She is often praised for her sympathy for these subjects, a quality which is not immediately understood through the images themselves, but through her writing and the testimonies of the men and women she portrayed. 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.
Personal life
In 1941, at the age of 18, she married her childhood sweetheart, Allan Arbus, whom she had dated since age 14. Their daughter Doon, who would become a writer, was born in 1945; their daughter Amy, who would become a photographer, was born in 1954. Arbus and her husband worked together in commercial photography from 1946 to 1956, but Allan remained very supportive of her work even after she left the business and began an independent relationship to photography.
Arbus and her husband separated in 1959, although they maintained a close friendship. The couple also continued to share a darkroom, where Allan's studio assistants processed her negatives, and she printed her work. The couple divorced in 1969 when he moved to California to pursue acting. After Diane’s death, Allan became well-known for his role as Dr. Sidney Freedman, a United States Army psychiatrist, on the television show M*A*S*H. Before his move to California, Allan set up Diane’s darkroom, and they thereafter maintained a long correspondence.
In late 1959, Arbus began a relationship with the art director and painter Marvin Israel that would last until 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, encouraging her to create her first portfolio. Richard Avedon was among the photographers and artists Arbus befriended; he was approximately the same age, his family had also run a Fifth Avenue department store, and many of his photographs were also characterized by detailed frontal poses.
Death
Arbus experienced "depressive episodes" during her life, similar to those experienced by her mother; the episodes may have been made worse by symptoms of hepatitis. In 1968, Arbus wrote a letter to a friend, Carlotta Marshall, that says: "I go up and down a lot. Maybe I've always been like that. Partly what happens though is I get filled with energy and joy and I begin lots of things or think about what I want to do and get all breathless with excitement and then quite suddenly either through tiredness or a disappointment or something more mysterious the energy vanishes, leaving me harassed, swamped, distraught, frightened by the very things I thought I was so eager for! I'm sure this is quite classic." 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 died by suicide by ingesting barbiturates and cutting 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. Photographer Joel Meyerowitz told 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?"
Legacy
"[Arbus's] work has had such an influence on other photographers that it is already hard to remember how original it was", wrote the art critic Robert Hughes in a November 1972 issue of Time magazine. She has been called "a seminal figure in modern-day photography and an influence on three generations of photographers" and is widely considered to be among the most influential artists of the last century.
When the film The Shining, directed by Stanley Kubrick, was released to cinemas worldwide in 1980 and became hugely successful, millions of moviegoers experienced Diane Arbus's legacy without realizing it. The movie's recurring characters of identical twin girls who are wearing identical dresses appear on-screen as a result of a suggestion Kubrick received from crew member Leon Vitali. He is described by film historian Nick Chen as "Kubrick's right-hand man from the mid-70s onwards". Chen goes on to reveal, "Not only did Vitali videotape and interview 5,000 kids to find [the right child actor to portray] Jack Nicholson's [character's] son, Danny, he was also responsible for discovering the creepy twin sisters on the final day of auditions. The pair, in fact, weren't twins in Kubrick's script, and it was Vitali who immediately suggested Diane Arbus's infamous photo of identical twin sisters as a point of reference."
Since Arbus died without a will, the responsibility for overseeing her work fell to her daughter, Doon. She forbade examination of Arbus's correspondence and often denied permission for exhibition or reproduction of Arbus's photographs without prior vetting, to the ire of many critics and scholars. The editors of an academic journal published a two-page complaint in 1993 about the estate's control over Arbus's images and its attempt to censor characterizations of subjects and the photographer's motives in articles about Arbus. A 2005 article called the estate's allowing the British press to reproduce only fifteen photographs an attempt to "control criticism and debate". On the other hand, it is common institutional practice in the U.S. to include only a handful of images for media use in an exhibition press kit. The estate was also criticized in 2008 for minimizing Arbus's early commercial work, although those photographs were taken by Allan Arbus and credited to the Diane and Allan Arbus Studio.
In 2011, a review in The Guardian of An Emergency in Slow Motion: The Inner Life of Diane Arbus by William Todd Schultz references "... the famously controlling Arbus estate who, as Schultz put it recently, 'seem to have this idea, which I disagree with, that any attempt to interpret the art diminishes the art.'"
Critical reception
In a 1967 review of MoMA's New Documents exhibition, which featured the work of Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand, Max Kozloff wrote, "What these photographers have in common is a complete loss of faith in the mass media as vehicle, or even market for their work. Newsiness, from the journalistic point of view, and 'stories', from the literary one, in any event, do not interest them .... Arbus' refusal to be compassionate, her revulsion against moral judgment, lends her work an extraordinary ethical conviction."
Writing for Arts Magazine, Marion Magid stated, "Because of its emphasis on the hidden and the eccentric, this exhibit has, first of all, the perpetual, if criminal, allure of a sideshow. One begins by simply craving to look at the forbidden things one has been told all one's life not to stare at ... One does not look at such subjects with impunity, as anyone knows who has ever stared at the sleeping face of a familiar person, and discovered its strangeness. Once having looked and not looked away, we are implicated. When we have met the gaze of a midget or a female impersonator, a transaction takes place between the photograph and the viewer; in a kind of healing process, we are cured of our criminal urgency by having dared to look. The picture forgives us, as it were, for looking. In the end, the great humanity of Diane Arbus' art is to sanctify that privacy which she seems at first to have violated."
Robert Hughes in a Time magazine review of the 1972 Diane Arbus retrospective at MoMA wrote, "Arbus did what hardly seemed possible for a still photographer. She altered our experience of the face."
In his review of the 1972 retrospective, Hilton Kramer stated that Arbus was "one of those figures—as rare in the annals of photography as in the history of any other medium—who suddenly, by a daring leap into a territory formerly regarded as forbidden, altered the terms of the art she practiced ... she completely wins us over, not only to her pictures but to her people, because she has clearly come to feel something like love for them herself. "
Susan Sontag wrote an essay in 1973 entitled "Freak Show" that was critical of Arbus's work; it was reprinted in her 1977 book On Photography as "America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly". Among other criticisms, Sontag opposed the lack of beauty in Arbus's work and its failure to make the viewer feel compassionate about Arbus's subjects. Sontag's essay itself has been criticized as "an exercise in aesthetic insensibility" and "exemplary for its shallowness". Sontag has also stated that "the subjects of Arbus's photographs are all members of the same family, inhabitants of a single village. Only, as it happens, the idiot village is America. Instead of showing identity between things which are different (Whitman's democratic vista), everybody is the same." A 2009 article noted that Arbus had photographed Sontag and her son in 1965, causing one to "wonder if Sontag felt this was an unfair portrait". Philip Charrier argues in a 2012 article that despite its narrowness and widely discussed faults, Sontag's critique continues to inform much of the scholarship and criticism of Arbus's oeuvre. The article proposes overcoming this tradition by asking new questions, and by shifting the focus away from matters of biography, ethics, and Arbus's suicide.
Publications
Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph. Edited by Doon Arbus and Marvin Israel. Accompanied an exhibition at Museum of Modern Art, New York.
New York: Aperture, 1972. ISBN 9780912334400.
New York: Aperture, 1997. ISBN 9780893816940.
Fortieth-anniversary edition. New York: Aperture, 2011. ISBN 978-1-59711-174-4 (hardback); ISBN 978-1-59711-175-1 (paperback).
Diane Arbus: Magazine Work. Edited by Doon Arbus and Marvin Israel. With texts by Diane Arbus and an essay by Thomas W. Southall.
New York: Aperture, 1984. ISBN 978-0-89381-233-1.
London: Bloomsbury, 1992. ISBN 9780893812331.
Untitled. Edited by Doon Arbus and Yolanda Cuomo.
New York: Aperture, 1995. ISBN 978-0-89381-623-0.
New York: Aperture, 2011. ISBN 978-1-59711-190-4.
Diane Arbus: Revelations. New York: Random House, 2003. ISBN 9780375506208. Includes essays by Sandra S. Phillips ("The question of belief") and Neil Selkirk ("In the darkroom"); a chronology by Elisabeth Sussman and Doon Arbus including text by Diane Arbus; afterword by Doon Arbus; and biographies of fifty five of Arbus's friends and colleagues by Jeff L. Rosenheim. Accompanied an exhibition that premièred at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Diane Arbus: A Chronology, 1923–1971. New York: Aperture, 2011. ISBN 978-1-59711-179-9. By Elisabeth Sussman and Doon Arbus. Contains the chronology and biographies from Diane Arbus: Revelations.
Silent Dialogues: Diane Arbus & Howard Nemerov. San Francisco: Fraenkel Gallery, 2015. ISBN 978-1881337416. By Alexander Nemerov.
Notable photographs
Arbus's most well-known photographs include:
Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C. 1962 – Colin Wood, with the left strap of his jumper awkwardly hanging off his shoulder, tensely holds his long, thin arms by his side. Clenching a toy grenade in his right hand and holding his left hand in a claw-like gesture, his facial expression is one of consternation. The contact sheet demonstrates that Arbus made an editorial choice in selecting which image to print. A print of this photograph was sold in 2015 at auction for $785,000, an auction record for Arbus.
Teenage Couple on Hudson Street, N.Y.C., 1963 – Wearing long coats and "worldlywise expressions", two adolescents appear older than their ages.
Triplets in Their Bedroom, N.J. 1963 – Three girls sit at the head of a bed.
A Young Brooklyn Family Going for a Sunday Outing, N.Y.C. 1966 – Richard and Marylin Dauria, who lived in the Bronx. Marylin holds their baby daughter, and Richard holds the hand of their young son, who is intellectually disabled.
A Young Man in Curlers at Home on West 20th Street, N.Y.C. 1966 – A close-up shows the man's pock-marked face with plucked eyebrows, and his hand with long fingernails holds a cigarette. Early reactions to the photograph were strong; for example, someone spat on it in 1967 at the Museum of Modern Art. A print was sold for $198,400 at a 2004 auction.
Boy With a Straw Hat Waiting to March in a Pro-War Parade, N.Y.C. 1967 – With an American flag at his side, he wears a bow tie, a pin in the shape of a bow tie with an American flag motif, and two round button badges: "Bomb Hanoi" and "God Bless America / Support Our Boys in Viet Nam". The image may cause the viewer to feel both different from the boy and sympathetic toward him. An art consulting firm purchased a print for $245,000 at a 2016 auction.
Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J. 1967 – Young twin sisters Cathleen and Colleen Wade stand side by side in dark dresses. The uniformity of their clothing and haircut characterize them as being twins while the facial expressions strongly accentuate their individuality. This photograph is echoed in Stanley Kubrick's film The Shining, which features twins in an identical pose as ghosts. A print was sold at auction for $732,500 in 2018.
Solo exhibitions
1967: New Documents. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
1972: Diane Arbus Portfolio: 10 Photos. Venice Biennale.
1972–1975: Diane Arbus (125 photographs, curated by John Szarkowski). Museum of Modern Art, New York; Baltimore; Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Detroit Institute of Arts; Witte Memorial Museum, San Antonio, Texas; New Orleans Museum of Art; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, California; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Florida Center for the Arts, University of South Florida, Tampa; and Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Champaign.
1973–79: Diane Arbus: Retrospective (118 photographs, curated by Doon Arbus and Marvin Israel). Seibu Museum, Tokyo; Hayward Gallery, London; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, England; Scottish Arts Council, Edinburgh, Scotland; Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands; Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; Lenbachhaus Städtische Galerie, Munich, Germany; Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal, Germany; Frankfurter Kunstverein; 14 galleries and museums in Australia; and 7 galleries and museums in New Zealand.
1980: Diane Arbus: Vintage Unpublished Photographs. Robert Miller Gallery, New York; Fraenkel Gallery, New York.
1983: Diane Arbus: Photographs. Palazzo della Cento Finestre, Florence; Palazzo Fortuny, Venice; Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Milan.
1984–1987: Diane Arbus: Magazine Work 1960–1971. Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, Kansas; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis; University of Kentucky Art Museum, Lexington; University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach; Neuberger Museum, State University of New York at Purchase; Wellesley College Museum, Massachusetts; and Philadelphia Museum of Art.
1986: Diane Arbus. American Center, Paris; La Fundacion "la Caixa", Barcelona, Spain; La Fundacion "la Caixa", Madrid; Robert Klein Gallery, Boston, MA; Light Factory, Charlotte, NC.
Collections
Arbus's work is held in the following permanent collections: