Diane Arbus (March 14, 1923 –
July 26, 1971) was a photographer and writer noted for black-and-white square
photographs of "deviant and marginal people (dwarfs, giants, transgender
people, nudists, circus performers) or of people whose normality seems ugly or
surreal".
Arbus
Arbus believed that a camera could be "a
little bit cold, a little bit harsh" but its scrutiny revealed the truth;
the difference between what people wanted others to see and what they really
did see – the flaws. A friend said that
Arbus said that she was "afraid ... that she would be known simply as 'the
photographer of freaks'", and that phrase has been used repeatedly to
describe her.
Arbus was born Diane Nemerov to
David Nemerov and Gertrude Russek Nemerov who 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 father became a painter after retiring
from Russek's; her younger sister would become a sculptor and designer; and her
older brother, Howard Nemerov, would later become United States Poet Laureate,
and the father of the Americanist art historian Alexander Nemerov.
Diane Nemerov attended the
Fieldston School for Ethical Culture, a prep school. In 1941, at the age of
eighteen, she married her childhood sweetheart Allan Arbus. Their first
daughter Doon (who would later become a writer), was born in 1945 and their
second daughter Amy (who would later become a photographer), was born in 1954.
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. They contributed to Glamour, Seventeen,
Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and other magazines even though "they both hated
the fashion world".
In 1956, Arbus quit the
commercial photography business. Although earlier she had studied photography
with Berenice Abbott, her studies with Lisette Model, beginning in 1956, led to
Arbus's most well-known methods and style.
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 35 mm Nikon camera which produced grainy rectangular images 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. In 1964, Arbus began using a twin-lens reflex
Mamiya camera with flash in addition to the Rolleiflex. Her methods included
establishing a strong personal relationship with her subjects and
re-photographing some of them over many years.
During the 1960s, she 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.
The first major exhibition of
her photographs occurred at the Museum of Modern Art in a 1967 show called
"New Documents", curated by John Szarkowski. The show also featured
the work of Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander.
Some of her artistic work was done on
assignment. Although she continued to photograph on assignment (e.g., in 1968
she shot documentary photographs of poor sharecroppers in rural South Carolina
for Esquire magazine), 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.
Using softer light than in her
previous photography, she took a series of photographs in her later years of
people with intellectual disability showing a range of emotions. At first,
Arbus considered these photographs to be "lyric and tender and
pretty", but by June, 1971, she told Lisette Model that she hated them.
Diane and Allan Arbus separated
in 1958, and were divorced in 1969.
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.[6] Arbus wrote in 1968, "I go up and down a lot", and her
ex-husband 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. Marvin Israel
found her body in the bathtub two days later; she was 48 years old.
In 1972, a year after she
killed herself, Arbus became the first American photographer to have
photographs displayed at the Venice Biennale. Millions viewed traveling
exhibitions of her work in 1972–1979.
Between 2003 and 2006, Arbus and her work were
the subjects of another major traveling exhibition, Diane Arbus Revelations.
