The company’s former associate artistic director will step up when founding artistic director Jeffrey Horowitz departs in August Arbus served TFANA for over a decade as the theatre’s first associate artistic director Horowitz first invited her to direct Shakespeare and in a statement Arbus said she considers it the “greatest honor” of her career to carry forward his “remarkable legacy at TFANA an institution that has shaped me and been my artistic home for the past 15 years.” “I’m deeply inspired by the heart of TFANA’s mission We produce Shakespeare today because his language and ideas illuminate the urgent questions of our time And by presenting his plays and other canonical texts alongside today’s boldest voices we engage in a civic dialogue that spans centuries expanding the definition of ‘classical’—and shaping the canon of the future.” “Arin gets to the heart of what plays are about and why theatre is essential,” Horowitz said of Arbus in a statement “She pushes boundaries and is profoundly unsatisfied by the satisfactory She is a wise and brilliant person with a gift of humor Actors in her productions express the language and ideas of authors naturally and spontaneously I am thrilled the board has chosen Arin and that Arin has chosen to lead the theatre.” Other TFANA directing credits include Measure for Measure David Greig’s adaptation of Strindberg’s The Father Thornton Wilder’s adaptation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and a revival of Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth and has a keen passion for what excites and moves the next generation of theatremakers and theatregoers TFANA is in the midst of a national search led by Arts Consulting Group for a new executive director who will work in partnership with Arbus Founded in 1979 by Jeffrey Horowitz, and led by Horowitz and Managing Director Dorothy Ryan, Theatre for a New Audience is a New York City home for Shakespeare and other contemporary playwrights Support American Theatre: a just and thriving theatre ecology begins with information for all. Please join us in this mission by joining TCG which entitles you to copies of our quarterly print magazine and helps support a long legacy of quality nonprofit arts journalism ©2025 Theatre Communications Group Each gift is a stitch in the tapestry that celebrates our resilience Donate to TCG! Broadway Off-Broadway Off-Off Broadway Cabaret Dance Opera Classical Music Nashville Minneapolis / St. Paul Connecticut Atlanta Chicago Los Angeles WEST END UK Regional Canada Australia / New Zealand Europe Asia Latin America Africa / Middle East TV/Movies Music Founding Artistic Director Jeffrey Horowitz steps down on August 31 Theatre for a New Audience has announced that OBIE Award-winning director Arin Arbus will be its next Artistic Director when Founding Artistic Director Jeffrey Horowitz steps down on August 31 The appointment follows an extensive nationwide search led by Arts Consulting Group Arbus began working at TFANA in 2004 as an assistant on productions before serving for over a decade as the Theatre’s first Associate Artistic Director Arbus credits TFANA for its profound influence on her artistic development: it was Horowitz who first invited her to direct Shakespeare. In 2009, Arbus made her Off-Broadway and TFANA debut with Othello, starring John Douglas Thompson in the title role, Juliet Rylance as Desdemona, in her American debut, and Ned Eisenberg as Iago The production was a New York Times Critic’s Pick and described as “among the most sensitively directed eloquently designed and impeccably acted productions of a Shakespeare tragedy that the city has seen in years.” and an alum of Soho Rep’s celebrated Writer/Director Lab Arbus has been a guest professor of theatre at Yale and developed a keen passion for what excites and moves the next generation of theater-makers and theatergoers Just as education has become a natural extension of her directing practice performances for New York City public school students at TFANA have always struck a chord with her they gain confidence and a deeper connection to our society,” she says Community engagement—whether in leading a theatre company of prisoners inside a medium security prison for six years with Rehabilitation Through the Arts or in directing an Arabic adaptation of The Tempest for residents of a Syrian refugee camp in Greece with The Campfire Project—has also been central to her work: “Theater is a place where the barriers that divide us in ordinary life can disappear,” she says I’m excited to collaborate with TFANA’s dynamic staff, artists, audiences and board to create thrilling theater that entertains and provokes, that grapples with the complexities of our world, theater that brings together a diverse and ever broadening community to spark our imagination, embrace our contradictions, and deepen our shared understanding of what it means to be a human.” TFANA Board Chair Robert E. Buckholz says, “We’re truly honored and delighted to have an artist of Arin’s caliber taking on TFANA’s artistic leadership. We’re confident she will build on the great foundation Jeffrey has laid and will lead this wonderful organization to the next level. Horowitz says of Arbus, “Arin gets to the heart of what plays are about and why theatre is essential. She pushes boundaries and is profoundly unsatisfied by the satisfactory. Artists want to work with Arin. She is a wise and brilliant person with a gift of humor. Actors in her productions express the language and ideas of authors naturally and spontaneously. I am thrilled the Board has chosen Arin and that Arin has chosen to lead the theatre.” When Horowitz accepted the Obie Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2019, he said that founding TFANA in 1979 was “one of the best decisions [he] ever made.” Now, as Arbus steps in to lead the organization into the future, she takes an approach deeply rooted in its mission which she’s so familiar with and fiercely passionate about. She looks forward to harnessing the Polonsky’s capacity for, as she describes, an “epic scale [that] fosters an intimate connection between actor and audience, enabling artists to swing for the fences as they realize their own ‘most rare vision(s).’” Grace Aki's solo play To Free a Mockingbird, the critically acclaimed and award-winning production, will play a limited run at SoHo Playhouse this month. Learn more here! 59E59 Theaters has announced the lineup of its Summer 2025 season, featuring a robust collection of shows celebrating iconic love stories, a comedic peek into the life of government staffers, and exhilarating psychological dramas. Due to demand, a 4th presentation has been added for RISE: A New Musical, with music and lyrics by Scott Wilkinson, book by Eric C. Webb, and directed by Richard H. Blake (A Bronx Tale; Million Dollar Quartet). Rehearsals are officially underway for the Off-Broadway premiere of REVOLUTION, a new play by Brett Neveu, produced by Academy Award nominee Michael Shannon. Check out photos from inside the rehearsal room? function closestickysocial(){document.getElementById("foxsocial").style.display="none";}@media(max-width:1024px){.most-popular,.video-row{display:block;margin-top:25px}}Videos and exclusive discounts on tickets to your favorite shows © 2025 - Copyright Wisdom Digital Media, all rights reserved. Privacy Policy Log in to your Television Academy account: If you're seeking ways to connect with working television industry professionals joining our organization offers you unparalleled access Learn more about Television Academy Membership click below to start the application process The Team from Lola (AFI) accepts the Loreen Arbus Focus on Disability Scholarship This retrospective—which came to fruition with curation by Helena Musilova and Nathaniel Kilcer, production by Milosh Harajda and Marketa Tomkova, and design by Marek Cpin—is also about the journey behind the images. Here, Weber gives us a rare, personal glimpse into the evolution of his eye, which has shaped and challenged the photographic genre for more than 50 years and the wisdom he got from Diane Arbus that he hopes to pass on to the next generation of image-makers CULTURED: Your work often induces a sense of intimacy and authenticity How do you create genuine connections with your subjects describing a photograph or the process behind it is not something that comes naturally to me It diminishes the essence of whatever mysterious thing happens in the moment I think the key to establishing any connection with someone who I’m photographing is respect The most important thing for me is curiosity It doesn’t matter if someone I’m photographing is famous or a stranger I run into on the street The impulse is the same—the most extraordinary thing might happen so I’m always curious to see where the experience will take us.  CULTURED: After looking back through your archive for this show how would you describe the evolution of your photographic style from your early work to today Weber: I never think for a second about my photographic style. Every day is a different day for me, as it is for every photographer. Back in 2015, I did a story on the incredible war photographer Lynsey Addario in All-American Weber’s wife] and I publish each year Lynsey is an amazing person—she visited our studio and spoke with us about her experiences She was so charismatic and engaging—the whole experience was a thrill for all of us I’ve seen so many of her photographs in the New York Times covering the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and beyond Her images show the awful intensity of war but I also feel Lynsey’s presence in them It’s about the character of the person taking the picture.  CULTURED: Where do you find inspiration today I feel inspired when I read a poem or a book or an interesting article in the newspaper We used to get LIFE Magazine when I was a kid and it was so exciting when it would show up at our mailbox—the pictures of people but also the way the writing led me into their worlds I’m as hungry now as ever for inspiration and hope that I will be up to my last photograph CULTURED: Did you discover anything new about your work in the process of putting the show together CULTURED: Why did now feel like it was the right time for a retrospective I don't think of this exhibition as a retrospective—I think of it as a new beginning It’s given me a chance to revisit photographs I've done of friends and people who I looked up to and had the good fortune to meet But the whole experience left me feeling like there's so much more that I want to do—places to visit further discoveries to be made in the archive CULTURED: Is there a lesson you've learned that you'd like to pass on, which has relevance to people working today? Weber: As a photographer, it’s important to live with your own sense of doubt and a strong personal desire to try to answer the questions that you ask of yourself. I was fortunate to have a great teacher early on, Lisette Model at the New School. We often spoke of Diane Arbus, and I eventually got to know her as well. Diane told me about meeting Eddie Carmel, the “Jewish giant” she photographed at home in the Bronx. I always loved that picture and thought it was a wonderful portrait. But Diane told me how Eddie and his parents kept calling her afterwards, and how she carried them with her long after the photo was taken. That experience and that image became part of their story and hers as well. I guess what I’d say to a young photographer is that you can’t ever really close the door. Sign up to our newsletter for the latest arts and culture updates The Phoblographer may receive affiliate compensation for products purchased using links in this article. For more information, please visit our Disclaimers page. we didn’t realize know what to think and my email trails talk about how incredible the images are — which is something that I wouldn’t say lightly when staring at my inbox But then I got the book in and looked back at the original pitch I was pitched with some of the best photographs from the book — and there are more buried deeper in the pages A Fearless Eye: The Photography of Barbara Ramos is published by Chronicle Books. And you can get a copy on Amazon I don’t get the idea that Barbara was shy — instead I think that she just shot photos the same way that any modern street photographer would do I’m impressed and relieved at the layout Every single photo has its own dedicated page — and it’s all in square format That also means that every image is centered along with the book’s square design When it’s under the right lighting conditions there was thought and careful analysis put into the actual experience of the photo book I think that there are also some images that I wouldn’t have chosen to be part of the book I see why Barbara would’ve shot the photos that we see in the book as they all have something about them that’s very strong — whether it’s composition or the actual moment itself being an incredible one is so incredibly playful — yet I’m oddly bothered by the pole in the middle I wonder how color would’ve made the images better I could imagine some of these scenes colorized — and with that I think that maybe they would’ve made for even stronger moments For the very affordable price that it’s going for A Fearless Eye: The Photography of Barbara Ramos is a really good book All of the images she’s made are from LA — at least the ones from this era are from LA don’t go into this book expecting many of the more iconic scenes of America that you might be used to This year’s must-see shows range from a Nordic Pavilion exploring transgender spaces to a compelling Lebanese project confronting the realities of ecocide Frieze returns to The Shed in May with more than 65 of the world’s leading contemporary art galleries and the acclaimed Focus section led by Lumi Tan [Anderson Hays Cooper] 1968 © The Estate of Diane Arbus Get in touch for more information Become a Member to RSVP Frieze 91 members are invited to a private director led tour of Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited at David Zwirner Los Angeles Organized by David Zwirner and Fraenkel Gallery the exhibition debuted at David Zwirner New York in September 2022 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the artist’s momentous 1972 posthumous retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art New York. Cataclysm re-creates that iconic exhibition’s checklist of 113 photographs underscoring the subversive poignancy of Arbus’s work even today while highlighting the popular and critical upheaval the original exhibition precipitated This will be the first major survey of the artist’s work in Los Angeles since Diane Arbus: Revelations which was presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art over twenty years ago © FRIEZE 2025 Cookie Settings | Do Not Sell My Personal Information FAD Magazine FAD Magazine covers contemporary art – News Exhibitions and Interviews reported on from London Phillips is pleased to present highlights from the Photographs London: ULTIMATE on 21st November The sale is led by an exceptionally rare lifetime print of Diane Arbus’ Identical twins The print comes to auction from the private collection of celebrated Japanese photographer Ikk Narahara We are thrilled to announce highlights of our November auction in London lifetime print of Diane Arbus’ Identical twins 1967, a previously unseen work that offers collectors a profound connection to her legacy This auction celebrates a diverse range of photography highlighting the influential photographers of the 20th and 21st centuries—from iconic American artists such as Arbus and Richard Avedon to pivotal Japanese and Chinese photographers from the 1960s and 1970s—as well as contemporary visual artists including Gregory Crewdson and Hiroshi Sugimoto We look forward to welcoming visitors to view the pre-sale exhibition in London this November Photographs London: ULTIMATE, viewing 16th – 21st November 2024, Phillips Berkeley Square Auction 21st November view catalogue: phillips.com/auctions/auction/UK040224 Paris Highlights Preview: – 8th November 2024 46 Rue du Bac Mark Westall is the Founder and Editor of FAD magazine - Phillips has revealed highlights from the forthcoming Evening & Day Editions Auction Head of New Now picks her 8 works to see – maybe giving you an idea on what to bid Phillips’ Damien Hirst: Online Auction has realised £1,092,073 Join the FAD newsletter and get the latest news and articles straight to your inbox hair is an integral part of our everyday culture and offers unlimited design possibilities facial and body hair is an expression of our personality optimise and conceal a part of our identity to set ourselves apart or fit into a collective and thus to send out messages – whether intentionally or unintentionally In the everyday tension between intimacy and public representation political and everyday cultural significance of hair through a wide range of historical and contemporary photographs videos and film clips from art as well as fashion and social media The comprehensive exhibition shows that hair is always a carrier of information The way we wear our hair is not only determined by the pursuit of beauty ideals but has always been politically and socially charged as an identity-forming feature a spiritual material and a communicator of social status In its historical and popular science dimension the exhibition explores the question of how representations of hair at the interface of art fashion and advertising photography are not only the subject of the beauty industry body-political and post-colonial discourses the exhibits dating from the 19th century to the present day shed light on the ways in which images of hair have consolidated and defined trends over the course of time By logging in to LiveJournal using a third-party service you accept LiveJournal's User agreement sensen wrote in adski_kafeteri Anonymous comments are disabled in this journal Your IP address will be recorded  We have added a new feature - video hosting Please click here to upload videos and insert them in your post The Park Avenue Armory has revealed its 2025 season World Premiere: Cross-disciplinary artist Anne Imhof’s new large-scale durational performance piece titled DOOM which will take over the Armory with bodies North American Premiere: CONSTELLATION an exhibition of more than 450 prints by revolutionary photographer Diane Arbus in the most comprehensive assemblage of her work to date  The largest North American installation of Yoko Ono’s ongoing work WISH TREE a grove of 92 trees installed in the Drill Hall in celebration of the artist’s 92nd birthday each holding personal wishes written by visitors  Additional programs in the season include the launch of the North American concert tour for Jamie xx’s In Waves; Trajal Harrell’s new dance piece set on a Mondrian-inspired catwalk Monkey off My Back or the Cat’s Meow;a musical cabaret adaptation of Larry Mitchell’s 1977 cult manifesto The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions; Making Space at the Armory and symposia with arts and culture thought-leaders exploring greater social and artistic ideas Park Avenue Armory today announced its 2025 season that features bold transformative artistic experiences from Jamie xx and more that subvert and expand expectations of what contemporary music Comprised predominantly of world and North American premieres the 2025 season builds on the Armory’s history of presenting masterpieces in spatial music and elevating singular artistic perspectives from across the world these productions will engage with the Armory’s iconic architecture in unexpected ways offering unique settings for audiences to experience music The historic period rooms will host intimate Recital Series performances and Artists Studio programs curated by Jason Moran showcasing the talents of visionary artists across genres These programs will be complemented by Making Space at the Armory “This season’s Drill Hall programs encompass a thrilling spectrum of settings and moods that capture the complexity of our current moment,” Hersh Artistic Director of Park Avenue Armory “We will explore a range of performance styles that reimagine traditions of pageantry and storytelling from a large-scale performance commission by the fearless Anne Imhof to Trajal Harrell’s fashion- and freedom-forward catwalk to a musical staging of the revolutionary idealism of the 1970s We are also celebrating the legacies of Diane Arbus and Yoko Ono and welcoming two incredible musical innovators back to the Armory—Jamie xx and Georg Friedrich Haas—as they undertake new immersive concert projects.” some of the most cutting-edge artists of our time will be invited to the Armory to illuminate complex histories Flatto Founding President and Executive Producer of Park Avenue Armory “Within the historic architecture and massive scale of the Drill Hall and with the collaboration of our partners their visions will unleash the fullest potential of what art can be and do.” The Armory’s 2025 Wade Thompson Drill Hall programming begins in January with Jamie xx’s In Waves a co-presentation with Bowery Presents that launches the North American tour for the artist’s first solo album in 10 years Returning to the Armory following his sold-out residency with The xx in 2014 Jamie xx will perform a career-spanning set with an emphasis on his newest album, In Waves Revolutionary artist and activist Yoko Ono will bring the largest installation to date in North America of her ongoing work Wish Tree to the Armory in February Featuring a grove of 92 trees installed in the Wade Thompson Drill Hall to mark the artist’s 92nd birthday the work will invite visitors to write and attach wishes to the branches creating a large-scale yet personal activation Ono’s work will be the topic of a two-day symposium as part of the Armory’s Making Space series which will emphasize her legacy of advancing female empowerment Multifaceted contemporary artist Anne Imhof will transform the Armory with her new performance piece DOOM Imhof is best known for creating large-scale installations that meld various media to create singular compositions—one of which, Faust received the Golden Lion at the 2017 Venice Biennale Commissioned specifically for the Armory and curated by Klaus Biesenbach, DOOM marks Imhof’s largest performative work to date and will take over the Drill Hall durational performance punctuated by dramatic tableaux vivants of performers will invite audiences into a shared experience that juxtaposes apathy and anxiety with resistance and optimism One of the most original and influential photographers of the twentieth century, Diane Arbus captured the wide breadth of humanity in postwar America with iconic documentary-style photographs that continue to resonate with artists and viewers today a photographer and student of hers Neil Selkirk began printing for the Arbus Estate and remains the only person authorized to create prints from her negatives Presented at the Armory in its North American premiere, Constellation brings together all prints from the set of more than 450 that Selkirk produced—the largest and most complete assemblage of Arbus’s work to date Presented as an unconventional “constellation” of photographs the exhibition invites visitors to wander freely among the works revealing new connections between the images and highlighting the imperceptible architecture of chance and exploration that underlies all creations and Guggenheim Fellow Trajal Harrell will make his Armory debut with the North American premiere of Monkey Off My Back or The Cat’s Meow and history through a fashion spectacle featuring a large cast of dancers and actors wearing more than 60 Harrell-designed looks Staged on a Mondrian-esque colored grid spanning the length of the Drill Hall—and echoing the Armory’s own history of hosting fashion shows—Monkey Off My Back juxtaposes everyday gestures and extravagant poses with historical and pop culture references including political rhetoric drawing on the Declaration of Independence and its urgent calls for freedom resulting in a parade of expressiveness that celebrates the imaginative and unifying power of art Maverick composer Georg Friedrich Haas will present the North American premiere of 11,000 Strings a continuation of the spatial music masterpieces that the Armory has presented within its massive 55,000-square-foot Drill Hall including 2024’s Inside Light and 2022’s Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) For 11,000 Strings, audiences will be surrounded by a ring of 50 micro-tuned pianos played simultaneously and amplified by soloist ensemble Klangforum Wien to create cascading sonic landscapes ranging from tenderly melodic to a thunderous roar Pushing the sonic palette of a piano beyond traditional tonality by introducing all possible pitches Haas’s experimentalism seeks to explore new ways that humans can perceive sound creating a wholly unexpected listening experience The 2025 season concludes with The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions a stage adaptation of Larry Mitchell and Neil Asta’s 1977 cult manifesto which offers a radically reimagined history of the world told through fables and myths with a queer Composer Philip Venables and director Ted Huffman have taken Mitchell’s original text and transformed it into a cabaret-like spectacle and dance traditions from Baroque to Broadway The eclectic cast of performers eschews norms of gender and genre continually swapping roles while weaving deeply personal stories of community and survival Equally satirical and vulnerable, The Faggots and Their Friends is a kaleidoscopic celebration of queerness and a political manifesto that puts marginalized voices center-stage the Armory will present intimate performances and educational programs in its exquisite period rooms The Board of Officers Room offers a home for classical and contemporary concerts through the Armory’s Recital Series with performances by award-winning baritone Konstantin Krimmel in his North American recital debut with pianist Ammiel Bushakevitz soprano and Metropolitan Opera Lindemann Young Artist Program graduate Erin Morley with pianist Gerald Martin Moore Samoan tenor Pene Pati with pianist Ronny Michael Greenberg in his North American solo recitaldebut pianist and MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellow Jeremy Denk mezzo-soprano and two-time Grammy Award winner Sasha Cooke with pianist Myra Huang and two-time Grammy Award winning ensemble The Veterans Room will continue to host the Artists Studio Grammy-nominated jazz pianist Jason Moran The 2025 Artists Studio offers imaginative performances from today’s most creative voices who defy categorization and freely explore artistic forms Programs will feature curator and composer Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe Swedish experimental vocalist Sofia Jernberg with special guests solo performer and drummer Guillermo E and Norwegian artist and musician Sandra Mujinga The Armory will also present Making Space at the Armory and other programming that sparks conversation on contemporary issues with today’s leading artists Armory Curator of Public Programming and Guggenheim fellow Tavia Nyong’o will host the series focusing on the connections between art and civic life in our current moment In addition to a two-day symposium that explores the legacy of multidisciplinary artist and activist Yoko Ono programming includes a night of chamber music composed by Brent Michael Davids that chronicles the 400th anniversary of the origins of New Amsterdam and the enduring presence of the Lenape and additional Indigenous peoples; a panel discussion celebrating the legacy of Vogue editor and creative icon Andre Leon Talley led by thought leaders in the fashion industry that explores fashion’s role in self-expression and resistance; a collective conversation with Black theater makers that manifests the influence and importance of Black theaters across the country; and additional dialogues with artists Anne Imhof, Trajal Harrell, Georg Friedrich Haas, Philip Venables I Sought My Soul explores the phenomenon of new autonomy within a utopian vision of unity. the works on view highlight a new medium for the artist: bronze. Berlin’s historic contemporary art institute KW re-opens In short, I spent around 16 hours in Miami Beach, going from fair to fair to write articles Being a kid in a wealthy family also however meant she was mostly raised by maids. It was perhaps the environment she lived in that she somewhat separated herself from the family. Even though her parents didn’t directly raise her, they had an indirect influence on her life. After her father retired, he became a painter. Her sister became a designer and sculptor, and her brother a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. Diane herself started painting but quit just after she finished high school. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Int'l Center of Photography (@icp) on Mar 14 Arbus married relatively young at the age of 18 to a man named Allan Arbus They both worked in a commercial photography business for a while from 1946 to 1956 the marriage didn’t work out and they got divorced in 1969 You might actually remember him from the TV series M*A*S*H in which he played Dr But it is not Diane Arbus’ personal life that I want to talk about — let’s look into her photography career Arbus received her first camera (a Graflex camera) just after she married at the age of 18 Her husband was a photographer for the U.S She started taking photography classes with Berenice Abbot a photographer best known for her portraits Diane and her husband started Diane & Allan Arbus a commercial photography business where she would have the role of art director She was responsible for concepts and models which wasn’t a dream come true for her as she saw her position as very unfulfilling Even though Diane and Allan both didn’t particularly like fashion photography the business produced photographs for Russek’s advertisements and also for fashion magazines such as Vogue A photograph that they made for Vogue magazine of a father and son reading a newspaper was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition “The Family of Man” in 1955 Diane Arbus admired the grainy look the camera and film were able to produce Her camera of choice was first a Nikon with a 35mm lens that she used for photographing New York City she switched to a twin-lens reflex Rolleiflex camera The medium format camera came to be one of Arbus’ compositional signatures She explained this transition saying: In the beginning of photographing, I used to make very grainy things. I’d be fascinated by what the grain did because it would make a kind of tapestry of all these little dots… But when I’d been working for a while with all these dots, I suddenly wanted terribly to get through there. I wanted to see the real differences between things… I began to get terribly hyped on clarity. Diane Arbus later began shooting what we can now call her own style of street photography. One of the important mentors in her career was Lisette Model, an Austrian-born photographer mostly known for her street photography. She later said Arbus came to her telling her she cannot photograph. “I want to photograph what is evil,” Arbus told Model, who noted that “[Arbus] was determined to reveal what others had been taught to turn their backs on.” The scheme typical for her photography is a frontal portrait in square format. She was one of the pioneers of daylight flash use, which she used to isolate her subjects. What she first liked about it was how it alters light and reveals things you don’t normally see. She wanted to have stillness in her photograph, and that is why she always posed her subjects either on the street or in their homes. Arbus made the subjects look directly to the camera to “freeze” the picture. However, as we can see in many of her picture the effect was quite the opposite. Many of her pictures look spontaneous. A post shared by Jack Wilks (@museum.addict) on May 8 Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park 1962 is probably one of the most famous ones The image is unusual and (I would say) a little disturbing seeing a kid who looks tense and angry in a pose with his teeth clenched and holding a hand grenade in one hand with the second hand in a shape of claw-like gesture is a bit… unusual Standing alone makes him isolated from others in the park The photo is considered to be one of the most important and influential images of 20th-century art and post-modernist art theory. When we look at the contact sheet we find that Arbus took plenty of “normal” photographs of the kid in the park smiling and playing around The boy in the photograph is named Colin Wood, and he later said: She catches me in a moment of exasperation My parents had divorced and there was a general feeling of loneliness She saw that and it’s like…commiseration It’s all people who want to connect but don’t know how to connect And I think that’s how she felt about herself She felt damaged and she hoped that by wallowing in that feeling What’s interesting is that more than shooting random subjects she met on the street Arbus was often trying to develop a personal relationship with the subjects and photograph them over time She started to photograph much differently than was common until then The intention behind it was to be original and unique ‘A very young baby, N.Y.C. 1968‘ is a photograph of Anderson Cooper, CNN correspondent and son of Gloria Vanderbilt. It was one of the photographs Arbus took for Harper’s Bazaar in 1968. She knew the parents, so she asked about coming over and spending some time photography the newly born baby. She returned repeatedly over 3 weeks and shot a lot of pictures before finally picked the published one. Cooper himself doesn’t find it disturbing. The photographs from Arbus are reportedly in his room alongside a note by Diane. A post shared by Giorgio Moltisanti (@6drowning6man6) on Nov 19, 2019 at 3:04am PST ”Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, NY, 1970,” is a photograph by Arbus of Eddie Carmel standing in his parents’ living room. It is an archetype of Arbus’s photographs. As a teen, even though Carmel was normal height during his childhood, Carmel started to grow uncontrollably as a result of acromegaly. He grew to be 8’9″, or 270cm. The photo looks like a preparation for the family portrait. For me, the vignetting intensifies his size and the voyeuristic feel from the photograph, as if you’re sneaking in someone’s home and watching them through the keyhole. Unfortunately, Carmel died at the age of 36, just 2 years after Arbus took this photograph. Arbus believed she got what she called every mother’s nightmare. “You know how every mother has nightmares when she’s pregnant that her baby will be born a monster?” Arbus says. “I think I got that in the mother’s face as she glares up at Eddie, thinking, Oh my God, no.” A post shared by Diane Arbus (@diane_arbus) on Mar 7 One of my favorite shots is “The Girl in Her Circus Costume 1970.” Somehow I just can’t avoid the comparison of the Wonderwoman from the Marvel universe and for me this photo is a representation of the 70s and how would they probably portray the subject at that time The subjects Arbus photographed were often people with troubled lives people from the underground or just people who were not accepted or respected by the rest of society She often sympathized with them probably because it was often something she wasn’t able to experience in her life — the subjects had completely different backgrounds than she had She said the subjects in her pictures were more important for her than the picture itself “Some people like to think of [Arbus] as cynical,” said photographer Edmund Shea Perhaps the most valuable thing for her was not the photograph but the event of visiting someone and the process of making the photographs I wouldn’t say she was redefining beauty but perhaps showing the space between how the people wanted to be seen and how they were seen When we want to learn about how influential she was I think it is best to use the words of art critic Robert Hughes: “Arbus’s work has had such an influence on other photographers that it is already hard to remember how original it was.” Arbus was twice awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship; first in 1963 for a project called “American Rites, Manners, and Customs” and then again in 1966. During the 60s, Arbus worked for magazines but also took all kinds of commissions — she had to do it since it was pretty difficult at that time to make living just by selling fine art photography As she became even more recognized as an artist she took fewer magazine assignments and she also taught photography in New York City and Rhode Island She was the first photographer to be featured in Artforum an international magazine focusing on contemporary art She had her first big exhibition at the Museum of Modern art in New Documents in 1967 which was a documentary photography exhibition curated by John Szarkowski Thirty-two of her photographs were chosen for the exhibition that represented a new direction in photography: ordinary subjects with a snapshot-like look The exhibition presented works of three photographers: Diane Arbus Arbus suffered from depression as well as hepatitis She experienced mood swings and her then ex-husband even talked about “violent changes of mood” Arbus’ works are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York Become a PetaPixel Member and access our content ad-free Michael Arbus, CEO of Moomoo in Canada, tells Good Money Guide about how Moomoo Michael highlights the importance of financial literacy and the significance of community in sharing trading strategies He also touches on the landscape of crypto trading in Canada and concludes with insights on options trading strategies for income generation Richard is the founder of the Good Money Guide (formerly Good Broker Guide) one of the original investment comparison sites established in 2015 With a career spanning two decades as a broker he brings extensive expertise and knowledge to the financial landscape Having worked as a broker at Investors Intelligence and a multi-asset derivatives broker at MF Global (Man Financial) Richard has acquired substantial experience in the industry His career began as a private client stockbroker at Walker Crips and Phillip Securities (now King and Shaxson) following internships on the NYMEX oil trading floor in New York and London IPE in 2001 and 2000 Richard’s contributions and expertise have been recognized by respected publications such as The Sunday Times the Good Money Guide has evolved into a valuable destination for comprehensive information and expert guidance His commitment to delivering high-quality insights has solidified the Good Money Guide’s standing as a well-respected resource for both customers and industry colleagues You can contact Richard at richard@goodmoneyguide.com You must be logged in to post a comment 🇬🇧 – 🇺🇸 – 🇦🇪 – 🇦🇺 – 🇿🇦 – 🇨🇦 – 🇸🇬 DISCLAIMER: The information contained in this website is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice The material does not contain (and should not be construed as containing) investment advice or an investment recommendation AFFILIATE NOTICE: Some of the links on Good Money Guide are affiliate links. This means that when you click through from us to a provider and open an account we may receive a payment. See about us for more information on how we make money and how we test providers GoodMoneyGuide.com is owned and operated by RJBCO Ltd Data protection registration number: ZA468875 ' + scriptOptions._localizedStrings.webview_notification_text + ' " + scriptOptions._localizedStrings.redirect_overlay_title + " " + scriptOptions._localizedStrings.redirect_overlay_text + " By subscribing, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy Christie’s is set to auction the photography collection of Trevor Traina The sale features works from postwar and contemporary masters like Diane Arbus with estimates reaching up to $2.8 million Mississippi (Red Ceiling) 1973 alone could fetch up to $300,000 USD a San Francisco native and tech entrepreneur started his career as a brand manager at Seagram’s before shifting to the art world where he advised San Francisco’s Fine Arts Museums and UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business Traina’s collection traces the evolution of photography from documentary roots to a recognized contemporary art form Highlights include Robert Frank’s groundbreaking The Americans and Diane Arbus’s portraits of society’s fringes “What you notice about people,” Diane Arbus said “is the flaw.” Arbus turned flaws into great photographs she pointed her camera straight across polite social boundaries What kind of person could work so intensely Arthur Lubow’s new biography of Arbus tells us who hardly had any defenses around herself and many artist biographies are correspondingly dull and quirks are all in their work; they live at a distance from what they produce separate ourselves from the rest of the world Arbus herself said she had sex with anyone who asked Just as the mother she despised had done a generation earlier Diane Nemerov (as she was born) was childishly determined to marry one of her father’s employees Sexual boundaries were only the most personal ones Diane Arbus seemed to disobey She made a career out of photographing what she considered to be beyond all sorts of pales She did not approach her subjects secretly She had the courage to get close to her subjects and talk to them he writes: “She revealed in those [therapy] sessions that the sexual relationship with Howard that began in adolescence had never ended She said she last went to bed with him when he visited New York in July 1971 That was only a couple of weeks before her death.” but its 85 chapters are conveniently short They take us through a life spent almost entirely in New York City rich in department-store money and poor in parental love; her marriage to Allan Arbus; their collaboration on fashion photography; her break with both Allan and fashion; a gradual rise to professional artistic acclaim; her suicide in 1971 After financial support from her parents and husband tapered off We may find it ironic that Arbus sold prints of pictures like Twins for $100 whereas a year ago a print of Twins sold for $602,500 Lubow gives us a manageable dose of chronology technical explanations about camera equipment and insight into the history of photography among the many facts and insights delivered in rapid succession we learn exactly where and when Arbus started photographing people with Down syndrome in the summer of 1969 Lubow quotes Arbus’s startling language; she wanted subjects who were “idiots imbeciles and morons (morons are the smartest of the three) especially the cheerful ones.” Quickly switching to a neutral technical point he tells us that around the same time Arbus stopped printing black borders around her photographs and started to use thin soft cardboard brackets “that she taped around the opening on top of the negative carrier to give a blurred and irregular edge to the image on the print.” By the end of the chapter we learn that in the late 1960s other photographers began to gain fame by publishing entire books of their work It helps that Arbus pronounced many a clever aphorism about photography One acts as the biography’s epigraph: “A photograph is a secret about a secret The more it tells you the less you know.” It also helps that Lubow worked hard for 12 years to locate unpublished accounts by Arbus’s exceptionally perceptive and articulate friends told Lubow: “She was certainly the most prying person I’ve ever known with an almost pathological need to have it all.” The only thing missing from Lubow’s biography is a keen sense of photographic form We’re not left with a sense of the photograph’s visual power Anyone seeking a poetic evocation of how an Arbus picture looks should turn to Silent Dialogues: Diane Arbus and Howard Nemerov (2015) by Alexander Nemerov the photographer’s nephew and the poet’s son compensate for the difficulty of translating the visual into the verbal with reproductions of the pictures they describe He lists the photographs he will talk about at the start of his book Lubow reveals laconically at the end of his book that he was not given permission by Arbus’s estate to reproduce the photographs Anyone who has wanted to publish about Arbus even the most serious academic photography historian knows how restrictive the Arbus estate has been A new phase in the history of Arbus’s reputation has recently begun but also because the photographer’s archives were given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2007 by Arbus’s daughters Earlier this summer the museum opened an exhibition of Arbus’s photography at its Met Breuer location All the most iconic Arbus photographs are on display Perhaps other titles would have exposed the absence of Arbus’s most problematic work which includes the photographs of people with Down syndrome For those who want to grapple with that extreme difficulty you are faced with a forest of thin grey slabs Isolation helps you concentrate on each photograph and heightens the spatial magic of Arbus’s aesthetic To a degree exceptional among photographers the impact of an Arbus photograph depends on a real relationship between you and it It (we have to remind ourselves in our digital scale-free era) is the size of an analogue-photography paper print In her images Arbus generated tremendous tensions between near and far That same pull works on you from the other side Yet you are the one who can still move away where the installation encourages you to weave back and forth whereas the usual gallery wall hanging cues lateral motion Diane Arbus: In the Beginning installation view the Met devotes a calm white cube to Arbus’s 1970 Box of Ten Photographs: her way of doing a book Arbus assembled her 10 favorite photographs in a plexiglass box that could double as a frame because it pretty much predicted which photographs would become her most famous Nine of the 10 box photographs are on display with the box (And the 10th is in the first exhibition space.) I’m thankful to Lubow for drawing my attention to the identical and identically placed hairpins worn by the twins He tells us how much Arbus liked that detail that click zones of black and white into place with their tiny zigzag The father of the identical twins thought it was the “worst likeness of the twins we’d ever seen”; one subject said her portrait “ranks up there with the worst things that ever happened to me.” Arbus simply wore down anyone whose flaw was not immediately apparent the closer her subjects feel to you in her photographs Yet that very literal closeness often created warped spatial and lighting effects that distorted her subjects optically Arbus sought to make her subjects look alien Though she lived her personal life without boundaries her own work perpetuated social boundaries Lubow reveals that Arbus’s fascination with her subjects was perfectly compatible with something verging on contempt She called her subjects “freaks” and “hideous”; she said they were not like her not what she wanted her children to look like No wonder she was wracked with recurrent self-doubt; she was much too smart not to notice the flaws in herself In the liberal democracies of the early 21st century we aspire to assuage everyone’s sensibilities and treat no one as an “other.” I am reminded of a three-step speech protocol written on the windows of a Los Angeles private school: “Is it true Is it necessary?” Arbus’s photographs may be true and only necessary to the extent that we believe unkind art is necessary Can we rationalize that cruel art forces us to see the error of our ways Does beauty ease us into admission of our faults Does revealing something marginal eventually make it less marginal whether what is true in Arbus’s photographs is less about her subjects Arbus’s photographs at the Met Breuer show us the power of our cruelty Subscribe to RSS Your request appears similar to malicious requests sent by robots Please make sure JavaScript is enabled and then try loading this page again. If you continue to be blocked, please send an email to secruxurity@sizetedistrict.cVmwom with: From tipsy flappers to weary parents and circus performers the great photographer captured life in all its raw beauty Her biographer revels in the biggest show of Arbus work ever Diane Arbus was drawn to people who reminded her of important figures in her life such as her flamboyant maternal grandmother or her lover Marvin Israel she was fascinated to the point of obsession by the discrepancy between who we are and how we want to be seen – what she called “the gap between intention and effect” Her list of favourite subjects includes female impersonators lobby murals of sylvan scenes and dioramas of murderers they were not quite what they first appeared to be an exhibition at the Luma Foundation in Arles is the largest display of Arbus prints ever mounted the Swiss pharmaceutical heiress who founded Luma purchased all 454 printer’s proofs made by Neil Selkirk the sole person authorised to print Arbus negatives after her suicide in 1971 At the suggestion of Luma photography curator Matthieu Humery Hoffman is displaying all the photos for the first time which was designed by architect Frank Gehry Humery has hung the photographs on metal scaffolds placing a mirrored wall at the back so the room appears to extend indefinitely “I wanted to break the idea of your being in a museum,” he explains you don’t know where it ends.” There is no prescribed path: you roam a random arrangement in which each image carries a jolt of both surprise and recognition Although fans may begrudge the omission of their favourite pictures (for me, Child With a Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, NYC 1962 Arbus was an excellent judge of her own work The chosen 10 display her range: among them those New Jersey twins who – manifesting completely different demeanours in identical bodies – seem to reveal within one image the alternative sides of a personality; the demonstrator with a tranquil air of innocence that belies his belligerent pro-Vietnam war buttons; the middle-aged nudist couple at home where a bare-breasted “girlie” picture decorates their wall and naked portraits of the pair stand atop the TV; the parents of the Jewish giant looking at their son with awe and dismay as his head grazes their apartment ceiling; the beautiful blonde wife and exasperated husband lying on recliners on their suburban lawn as their little son bends over an inflatable pool in the background; and a sterile living room in a Long Island tract home decorated with cheerless festivity for Christmas Two Ladies at the Automat Collection Maja Hoffmann / Luma FoundationFor those familiar with her output Constellation offers an unprecedented opportunity to see rare images They do not change one’s estimation of the artist; none of the unknown pictures rival her many famous ones even if they would rank as high points for another photographer But it is nonetheless fascinating to see how many pictures she took female impersonators in their dressing rooms impoverished people living in shacks in Beaufort and solitary women whom she might find on the street are the alternate takes of well-known images is a celebrated portrait of a latter-day flapper She looks a little inebriated as she smiles for the camera the left spaghetti strap of her slinky dress having slipped off her shoulder Seeing them in the same room reminds us of the difference between a great photograph and one that is merely very good Free weekly newsletterYour weekly art world round-up ‘Fascinated to the point of obsession’ … Arbus in New York in 1968 Photograph: Roz Kelly/Getty ImagesIt is regrettable that the guide to the exhibition doesn’t distinguish between the pictures Arbus chose to print and those only printed later by Selkirk A photographer not only exposes and processes the film – she also selects and prints what she deems worthy of exhibition but Arbus was fanatical about printing the full frame typically including the edge of the film in the print When an extensive selection of Arbus’s photographs of people with developmental disabilities was published as a book in 1995 as it was a project on which Arbus was working when she died many of the photographs included were ones she never chose to print herself but I would appreciate knowing whether they carry her imprimatur Masked Woman in a Wheelchair Photograph: © The Estate of Diane Arbus Collection Maja Hoffmann / Luma FoundationThe main impression left by this extraordinary exhibition which provides a full view of Arbus’s manifold achievement is how much great work she produced in her 15-year career and how fresh it continues to feel more than half a century after her death Because she regarded her subjects with a trademark blend of empathy and ridicule Arbus remains a controversial and unsettling artist half-naked in bed with a jaunty hat on his head and a post-coital because she herself was riven by contradictions The debate between critics who extol Arbus’s love for her subjects and those who denounce her for mocking them completely misses the point There can be little doubt she found humanity ridiculous as well as sympathetic she would giggle as she displayed her creations fully aware of both the courage required and the absurdity imposed by human existence Arthur Lubow is the author of Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer Diane Arbus: Constellations is at Luma Arles until 30 April 2024 This article was amended on 10 August 2023 to remove a reference to images that Neil Selkirk “selected” to print; he clarified that prints were made only at the request of the Arbus estate And a reference to “artist proofs” was changed to “printer’s proofs” obituaries in The New York Times have been dominated by white men we’re adding the stories of other remarkable people A photographer whose portraits have compelled or repelled generations of viewers Diane Arbus was a daughter of privilege who spent much of her adult life documenting those on the periphery of society her unblinking portraits have made her a seminal figure in modern-day photography and an influence on three generations of photographers though she is perhaps just as famous for her unconventional lifestyle and her suicide By AMISHA PADNANI and JESSICA BENNETT MARCH 8 Obituary writing is more about life than death: the last word Yet who gets remembered — and how — inherently involves judgment be a stark lesson in how society valued various achievements and achievers Since 1851, The New York Times has published thousands of obituaries: of heads of state, opera singers, the inventor of Stove Top stuffing and the namer of the Slinky The vast majority chronicled the lives of men Charlotte Brontë wrote “Jane Eyre”; Emily Warren Roebling oversaw construction of the Brooklyn Bridge when her husband fell ill; Madhubala transfixed Bollywood; Ida B. Wells campaigned against lynching Yet all of their deaths went unremarked in our pages Below you’ll find obituaries for these and others who left indelible marks but were nonetheless overlooked. We’ll be adding to this collection each week, as Overlooked becomes a regular feature in the obituaries section Took on racism in the Deep South with powerful reporting on lynchings a mob dragged Thomas Moss out of a Memphis jail in his pajamas and shot him to death over a feud that began with a game of marbles But his lynching changed history because of its effect on one of the nation’s most influential journalists who was also the godmother of his first child: Ida B “It is with no pleasure that I have dipped my hands in the corruption here exposed,” Wells wrote in 1892 in the introduction to “Southern Horrors,” one of her seminal works about lynching “Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so.” A feminist poet and revolutionary who became a martyr known as China’s ‘Joan of Arc.’ With her passion for wine, swords and bomb making, Qiu Jin was unlike most women born in late 19th-century China. As a girl, she wrote poetry and studied Chinese martial heroines like Hua Mulan (yes, that Mulan) fantasizing about one day seeing her own name in the history books But her ambitions ran up against China’s deeply rooted patriarchal society which held that a woman’s place remained in the home Qiu rose to become an early and fierce advocate for the liberation of Chinese women defying prevailing Confucian gender and class norms by unbinding her feet cross-dressing and leaving her young family to pursue an education abroad Established what may have been America’s first tennis court in the 1870s Mary Ewing Outerbridge didn’t have an easy time bringing tennis to America in 1874 And what were these stringed things with long handles A transgender pioneer and activist who was a fixture of Greenwich Village street life When she died at 46, under murky circumstances but her death did not attract much notice in the mainstream press A postwar poet unafraid to confront her own despair leaving milk and bread for the two toddlers to find when they woke up She stuffed the cracks of the doors and windows with cloths and tea towels a nurse found the poet Sylvia Plath in her flat on Fitzroy Road in London She was “lying on the floor of the kitchen with her head resting on the oven,” according to a local paper Cancer cells were taken from her body without permission She never traveled farther than Baltimore from her family home in southern Virginia but her cells have traveled around the earth and far above it but the trillions of those cells — generated from a tiny patch taken from her body — are labeled in university labs and biotechnology companies across the world where they continue to spawn and to play the critical role in a 67-year parade of medical advances A Bollywood legend whose tragic life mirrored Marilyn Monroe’s It was probably the first ghost story in Indian cinema A bewildered young man in a mansion chasing glimpses of an ethereal Nearly seven decades later, strains of the film’s signature song, “Aayega aane wala” (He will come) are instantly recognizable to most Indians evoking the suspenseful tale of lost love and reincarnation Oversaw the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge after her engineer husband fell ill It was not customary for a woman to accompany a man to a construction site in the late 19th century Petticoats tended to get in the way of physical work liaising and politicking between city officials and her husband’s bedside to see the world’s first steel-wire suspension bridge to completion She would become the first person to cross the bridge A Harlem Renaissance-era writer whose heritage informed her modernist take on the topic of race When Nella Larsen died, in 1964, she left little behind: a ground-floor apartment, two published novels, some short stories, a few letters. She was childless, divorced and estranged from her half sister, who, in some accounts, upon learning she was to inherit $35,000 of Larsen’s savings, denied knowing the writer existed It was a fitting end for a woman whose entire life had been a story of swift erasure A gifted mathematician who is now recognized as the first computer programmer A century before the dawn of the computer age, Ada Lovelace imagined the modern-day, general-purpose computer. It could be programmed to follow instructions, she wrote in 1843. It could not just calculate but also create, as it “weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.” The computer she was writing about, the British inventor Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, was never built. But her writings about computing have earned Lovelace — who died of uterine cancer in 1852 at 36 — recognition as the first computer programmer. The first American woman to win an Olympic championship. The first American woman to win an Olympic championship died without ever knowing what she had achieved. That woman, Margaret Abbott, won the ladies’ golf competition, as the event was genteelly known, at the 1900 Games in Paris. She received a gilded porcelain bowl, a smattering of coverage in the newspapers and then nothing. 2016Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this storyArbus at the “New Documents” show at the Museum of Modern Art the Metropolitan Museum of Art agreed to buy three photographs by Diane Arbus and a few months later the museum decided to take only two The Museum of Modern Art was more daring; in 1964 including “Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park N.Y.C.” Not until the aftermath of Arbus’s death and the retrospective of her work at moma the following year swelling far beyond the bounds of her profession “Child with a toy hand grenade” sold for two hundred and twenty-nine thousand dollars fetched seven hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars We have a contact sheet of the pictures that she took that day (It is reprinted in “Revelations,” a hefty and absorbing volume published in 2003 to accompany an Arbus retrospective.) Colin is dressed in shorts and suspenders which lend him a Teutonic air and in six of them he stands with hands on hips and you can count the missing teeth in his grin So why did Arbus pick the shot in which he tightens his mouth into a stretched-out grimace cupping one hand into an upturned claw while the other grips a grenade or doing an impersonation of someone—an actor in a monster movie be guilty of rigging the evidence to fit a mood until I read “Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer,” by Arthur Lubow (Ecco) stranded at the time with nannies while his parents were busy divorcing and “living primarily on powdered Junket straight from the box.” He brought his toy guns to school the kid wanting to explode but can’t because he’s constrained by his background.” If she did see all that with a touch of fellow-feeling; she had started out much like Colin Now she found a boy preparing to pull the pin “Giving a camera to Diane,” Norman Mailer said “is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.” construe the life that followed as one long struggle to get away from wealth—to crawl free of it like someone seeking the exit from a treasure-stacked cave “The outside world was so far from us,” Arbus said which to anyone who suddenly needed a mink stole “smart accessories for the correctly dressed woman.” In 1919 married a young window dresser at the store named David Nemerov was born twenty-one weeks after the wedding No woman was more correctly dressed than Gertrude She sailed to Paris with her husband whenever he went to survey the new couture collections Her pleasure was to be chauffeured to Russeks and to parade through its rooms in white gloves and patent-leather slippers saw herself as “a princess in some loathsome movie.” One thing Arbus claimed to have suffered from If you had asked any of the Dust Bowl farmers photographed in their thin clothes by Dorothea Lange whether they would mind getting dressed up and going to a workplace where everyone was nice to them a lingering whiff of the poor little rich girl but she revelled in settings that money couldn’t touch or in surfaces where it had left its scratch marks: Brenda Frazier twenty-eight years after she had been crowned “débutante of the year,” appears to be held together by powder She stepped aside from the notion that a photograph might in addition to its aesthetic shape and shock especially in an era of deprivation or unrest If she was a pilgrim on the fringes of society it was fascination rather than compassion that drove her there The balding and shirtless figure who glares at us in “Tattooed man at a carnival Md.” (1970) requests not an atom of our pity he puts our undistinguished bodies to scorn brandishing the art work of his torso as though to holler If all that privilege brought her a world of pain And it’s hard to think of a more frangible instance of motherhood than Gertrude “typically stayed in bed in the morning past eleven o’clock and applying cold cream and cosmetics to her face.” At one point she fell into a ravine of depression and got stuck sitting wordlessly at the family dinner table presented an alternative—and no less daunting—role model Though Gertrude’s parents had believed that she was marrying down rose through the ranks of Russeks as if stepping into the elevator he had arrived at the position of president Arbus inherited both strains: the urge to follow your star plus the rage to cut yourself off and plunge into personal lockdown One further twist in her upbringing was that she did not endure it alone although whether that closeness offered aggravation or relief is open to debate Diane masturbated in the bathroom with the blinds up to insure that people across the street could watch her and as an adult she sat next to the patrons of porno cinemas (This charitable deed was observed by a friend the screenwriter of “The Graduate.”) Not to be outdone in these vigorous stakes was her brother in a book called “Journal of the Fictive Life,” defined his self-abuse as “worship.” He added and said he would kill me if it ever happened again.” A friend of Gertrude’s once told Howard that reading Freud would make you sick it would be like a day in the life of the Nemerovs The summit of this weirdness comes before Lubow has reached page twenty that “the sexual relationship with Howard that began in adolescence had never ended She said that she last went to bed with him when he visited New York in July 1971 That was only a couple of weeks before her death.” The source for this is a psychiatrist named Helen Boigon who treated Arbus in the last two years of her life and who was interviewed—though not named—by Patricia Bosworth for her 1984 biography of Arbus (The results are in an archive at Boston University.) William Todd Schultz communicated with Boigon for “An Emergency in Slow Motion” (2011) his unblushing psychological portrait of Arbus proposing that “something did happen between the two siblings” but “what exactly or with a yarn entwined with myth and spun by a woman in distress what stands out is the tone of Arbus’s telling The intimate rapport of brother and sister was apparently recounted to the psychiatrist in a casual manner as though incest were no big deal—just a family habit that you kept up And that otherworldly coolness drifts into Arbus’s art What her admirers respond to is not so much the gallery of grotesques as her reluctance to be wowed or cowed by them still less to censure them or to set them up for mockery who worked in the advertising department at Russeks and described himself as “Mister Nobody.” The romance bore a startling resemblance to that of her parents just after he was shipped off to India on war service as a photographer Allan had given his wife a camera after their honeymoon and she had taken a course with the photographer Berenice Abbott with the encouragement (and the financial assistance) of David Nemerov Their apartment was on West Seventieth Street which hailed them as a professional couple in a piece called “Mr Inc.” With the article went a self-portrait: their heads are touching What spurred her to forge images—identical twins in identical dresses or “Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx N.Y.,” looming over his loved ones—that we realize Such is the conundrum that greets her biographers and Lubow begins his book with a dramatic solution: an occasion at the butt end of a day in which she and Allan had toiled on a shoot for Vogue that she was done with fashion photography the feeling of always being at the beginning.” Her first move was to study with Lisette Model who steered her away from the hazy (“I used to make very grainy things,” Arbus recalled) and toward a clarity that would specify rather than blur—confronting us with this person while Allan decamped to Washington Place; she regularly went there to use his darkroom In keeping with the rules of concealment by which she had been raised Arbus didn’t tell her parents about the split She didn’t realize it might be making Allan angry to think that his wife was yearning sexually for Alex, any more than she sensed that Jane might be alarmed and antagonized to learn that Allan thought Diane just wanted to go to bed with Jane’s fiancé. An earlier version misstated the Guggenheim foundation from which Arbus won a grant in 1963. diane arbus: in the beginning will travel to SFMOMA (January 21–April 30 Taxicab driver at the wheel with two passengers Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker A new version of the photographer’s 1972 exhibition resurfaces questions of exploitation Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited •   •   • begins with the original show’s critical reception Incendiary excerpts from reviews decorate the lobby Many express open dislike for Arbus’s work the selected quotes evincing revulsion masquerading as fake ethics It’s often unclear if the writers imagined themselves siding with Arbus’s exploited subjects against her (“Who wants to be a freak at the Museum of Modern Art?”) or were mad at Arbus for confronting them with these repellent oddities in the first place (“They are losers almost to a man.”) If we thought our era invented aesthetic criticism on the grounds of morality still-fresh tussle over the meaning of representation invites us to think again When it comes to “freaks”—which mostly seems to have meant people who are queer and/or of color—the ostensibly autonomous institutions of art give themselves over Arbus’s photographs radiate intensity She likes the accoutrements of femininity: big hair lacy straps digging into thighs; relatedly There are circus performers backstage in billowing outfits and nudists pleased to expose pale flesh—and as if the dialectic of revelation and concealment there are photographs of objects to emphasize it: a bedazzled Christmas tree pushing up at a cramped ceiling figures often seem overwhelmed by their own habitations; when outside Sometimes her subjects stare down her camera with the defiance of documented savages and sometimes they seem to bring themselves and as such they seem to depict an age in which the distressed animal that thrashes at the edges of a mechanized commodified society had yet to be engulfed by its simulacra Arbus’s famous taste for ugliness reads as a refusal to contribute to this subsumption a process that works by making the body look sleek and palatable “How indefatigable everyone is,” she writes in 1960 referring to the resistance of New York’s homeless population to municipal harassment her time now looks kinder than ours: multiple often strikingly joyful portraits of disabled people serve as an uncomfortable reminder of the current medical establishment’s eugenicist program of eradication Arbus’s contemporaries also aspired to depict the jagged theater of city streets whom Arbus showed alongside in MoMA’s New Documents exhibition of 1967 as someone with a vivid relation to the world doing things I’d fantasized about in my sheltered childhood,” she told Newsweek in 1967 From the perspective of this evergreen childhood fantasy “there’s a quality of legend about freaks Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands you answer a riddle.” Positioned thus her subjects take their place in the long lineage of depictions of the grotesque though altered by its development along with everything else the grotesque is a kind of open wound that art is magnetized by and can never fully assimilate that of the bourgeois adventurer who goes to the underworld to test her boundaries and in the process draws the outer contour of her own class position Photography is in fact something super traditional for Arbus: a mortification of the hubris of painting As a young artist she was admired by her family and teachers as a promising painter her talent carefully cultivated in progressive schools But she believed her paintings to be in some way lifeless because they were purely the creation of her imagination the paintings’ very proficiency offered up only the image of a bloated self-regard In a 1960 postcard to her friend and lover Marvin Israel “Our bourgeois heritage seems to me glorious as any stigma especially to see it reflected back and forth in the mirror of each other and magic chooses any guise and ours is just perhaps more hilarious than to have been Negro or midget.” It is funny to be a member of a class that draws its basic identity from its good taste—i.e. excellent shopping habits—and delicate maneuvering around the specter of social These maneuvers are motivated by the problem of class itself along with all the other social categorizations (race Subcultures are either proletarian or they are just sclerotic relics Arbus slummed it from a titivating distance the lives of the “Negro or midget” are a “glorious stigma” that points beyond any specific shame falsely accruing to race or stature The portraits aim to depict a subterranean shared condition the poor freaks of color and the depressed bourgeois photographer forged by the same scar tissue The shared magic therein is the magic of little gasps of life in a dead world Arbus couldn’t figure out how to photograph orgies she participated in judging the results as lacking in eroticism without the stimulation of alienation and objectless longing Her photographs are the self-portrait she could not produce in her own image made up of the negative space surrounding her class position: the gender outlaws the flesh oozing out from around the borders of propriety These portraits of “Negros and midgets” present a familiar form of tourism at the thrilling edges of respectability But they also depict the stigmata of the stupid parasitic nature of Arbus’s small world of origin Not all self-irony strives tirelessly toward a horizon of possible meaning If I hadn’t been chastened by the idiotic-sounding critics on the wall at Zwirner I could draw a clear line from Arbus to the inanities of something like early 2000s Vice magazine with its comparable attachment to pointing at freaks from a safe distance But Arbus’s search for truth in images was sincere not because she rescued freaks and minorities from obscurity but because she honestly portrayed her own complicated desire for access to a more alive-seeming realm of freaks and minorities No wonder Los Angeles and San Francisco made her deeply homesick: the freak-spotting disposition is distinctively part of the history of white bourgeois New York City where those who are into it have ample opportunity to play with the borders of their comfortable class position or spectate from it in a form of social safari I could froth my fascinated resentment of this structural aspect of urban life into a political point: undeniably this is a form of aesthetic primitive accumulation making new terrains of existence available for valorization via the art system Arbus’s portraits express real admiration and care for all that she knows she cannot be Hannah Black is an artist and writer from the UK. She lives in New York. She has previously written for Artforum, the New Inquiry, and a number of other publications. Recent exhibitions include Wheel of Fortune at ETH in Zurich and The Meaning of Life at York University Gallery in Toronto. Her novella Tuesday or September or the End was published this year. Early in her photography career, Diane Arbus was perplexed about how to possibly capture the grand mélange of humanity in her work. According to Arbus’s writings (published posthumously by Aperture), her mentor, street photographer Lisette Model taught her that “the more specific you are” in a photograph “the more general it’ll be.” Arbus questioned whether she should strive to capture a “generalized human being” in order for her work to be relatable but Model taught her otherwise—that photographs will resonate with more people if you shed generalities; if you dig deep into the heart of who is in front of your camera this scrutiny has to do with not evading facts not evading what it really looks like,” Arbus wrote The photographer’s unflinching gaze has been both celebrated and criticized since she rose to prominence in the 1960s Much of that attention is due to the subjects she was most drawn to: sideshow performers transgender sex workers—people living on the fringes of society but who also possessed a strong sense of identity It’s well-known that Arbus would visit the homes of many of her subjects who would invite her into their lives; she was able to connect with the people she met in a truly unique way Her gaze is most potent in her last body of work, “Untitled” (1969–71), both her most comprehensive and most incomplete series, made at residences for people with developmental disabilities. Much of the work was kept private until it was published in a 1995 monograph put together by her daughter, Doon; 66 images from the series—some never exhibited before—are on view now at David Zwirner in New York in 1969: “It’s the first time I’ve encountered a subject where the multiplicity is the thing.…I am not just looking for the best picture of them I want to do lots.” She would return to the residences for picnics But the way that people with developmental disabilities were seen by society in the 1960s differs markedly from today. Genetic disorders such as Down syndrome were treated as if they were mental illnesses, and, during the post-war economic boom, there was a sharp increase in the number of mentally ill and disabled children who were institutionalized because they were seen as a burden the writer crudely described the resident’s “physiognomies.” (Physiognomy is an outdated pseudoscience that determined personality traits based on facial features Gross noted that Arbus owned several psychology texts about mental illness and she was particularly fond of psychiatrist R who was critical of its surrounding stigma “seems so extraordinary in his empathy for madness that it suddenly seemed he would be the most terrific guide.” He also emphasized that her work was a departure from past photography series taken of the institutionalized which often provoked greater stigma by focusing on the deviance of the subject’s facial features and expressions Why did she choose to train her lens repeatedly on people who were so vulnerable knowing that she often proclaimed her love for photographing “freaks”—a caustic word to use today though Arbus seemed to do so with affection Critic Susan Sontag famously railed against Arbus’s practice in her 1977 collection of essays on a feeling that what the viewer is asked to look at is really other.” “Othering” is a term we are especially cautious about today Arbus did come from privilege—she was the middle child in a well-to-do Manhattan family that earned its wealth from her grandfather’s luxury department store “One of the things I felt I suffered from as a kid was I never felt adversity,” Arbus herself once said She sought out people with unusual stories and titled them as such: Mexican Dwarf in his Hotel Room and A Jewish Giant at Home with his Parents Even in her portraits of people who were not marginalized such as her widely known picture of twin girls critic Sean O’Hagan reduced Arbus’s vigorous personality to a woman who was “troubled,” with a “fragile state of mind,” her whole life eclipsed by her suicide in the very first sentence.) It wasn’t until a 2003 retrospective of Arbus’s work that many of her images The New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl argued that “imputations of ‘voyeurism’ are absurd; voyeurs must feel safe and Arbus’s pictures are like the gaping barrels of loaded guns.” Though there is always a power hierarchy between photographer and subject—a photographer is seeking honesty and vulnerability when the camera is raised—there is a difference between a photographer who takes the shot and leaves and building a rapport with the people she photographed a decade before she snapped the now-famous image of him and his parents; she was invited to celebrate the birthday of a prostitute whom she photographed in bed she returned to the residences of “Untitled” again and again taking portraits that suggested friendship and closeness between her and her subjects Looking particularly at the formal aspects of the images of “Untitled,” there was no pity in Arbus’s lens She captured each portrait with the same head-on view A lens placed low can signify heroism; placed high Arbus was on equal footing with everyone she photographed in the series by capturing all of her subjects in the same Rolleiflex square format—both those who lived outside of the margins along with those who lives neatly inside—she effaced the line between them “By photographing both ‘freaks’ and ‘normals’ in the same format Arbus sought to eliminate the invisible boundary between traditional representations of the white middle-class Protestant and the ‘other,’ and to depict the fragmentation of identity,” Gross explained the ideas of critics like Sontag were undercut by their own revulsion to the people with whom Arbus best connected “Arbus’s interest in freaks expresses a desire to violate her own innocence,” Sontag wrote you don’t get majesty and beauty,” she insisted “You get dwarfs.” She loathed how Arbus’s subjects appeared in her photos O’Hagan’s 2011 critique is also questionable: “Her images hold us in their sway even when our better instincts tell us to look away.” Why should we look away from people who are different “Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience Freaks were born with their trauma,” she once wrote “They’ve already passed their test in life Arbus’s images may not be as shocking as they were in the 1960s but they still have an enormous power to them We may not be able to completely place ourselves in her pictures—as she noted “it’s impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else’s”—but she does help us get a little closer we are a little more inclusive regarding what “normal” means Arbus asked that question through each of her photographs A quote from Laing rings as true today as it did when he wrote it in 1960 in his book The Divided Self: “In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality all our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal.” from 1956 to 1962.Drawn primarily from the rich holdings of The Met's Diane Arbus Archive—a remarkable treasury of photographs and correspondence—it is an essential volume for understanding Arbus and her oeuvre The book's design invites the reader to examine more than 100 of the artist's early photographs and in full possession of the many gifts for which she is now recognized the world over.» I spoke with Jeff L. Rosenheim and Karan Rinaldo, the authors of the catalogue and the curators of the exhibition about Arbus's work and what went into creating this remarkable publication Rachel High: The book begins with a quote by Arbus from 1957: "I am full of a sense of promise the feeling of always being at the beginning." It ends with another quote from near the end of her life: "The thing that's important is to know that you never know You're always sort of feeling your way." Both convey a sense of constant reinvention How do you think the idea of beginnings fits into the larger context of Arbus's career and that's not young for an artist to begin to work She had been active in fashion photography for several years before then but she felt like she was making a beginning Arbus emerged at a time when there were not many outlets for photographers aside from magazines that featured editorial Photography changed significantly during her lifetime and a renewed interest in independent art photography slowly developed The book concludes at the beginning of the next phase of her career when she was increasingly recognized for her work There's also a set of pictures in the beginning and end that serve as a visual prologue and epilogue Karan Rinaldo: The book includes photographs made through 1962 which was the year she transitioned from a 35mm camera to a 2 1/4-inch square-format Rolleiflex camera Jeff Rosenheim: Two-thirds of the pictures in the book have never been published We're introducing more than 80 new photographs which represent approximately another fifth of her oeuvre The publication includes variant images of works we already know as well as completely new works Some of the images represent subjects that we didn't know she explored until now—making the book revelatory Rachel High: This book unearths a lot of material from The Met's Diane Arbus Archive; it is rare to have access to such a direct view into the artist's process and intention for their work You have conducted eight years of research on the Arbus Archive and this book reproduces some of that material for the first time This interior spread of the catalogue reproduces a page from one of Arbus's appointment books Karan Rinaldo: Photographers' archives but what makes a photographer's archive special are the negatives and contact sheets which allow us to see the genesis and progression of the work My essay details some of the changes made to titles and dates based on notations found on the artist's annotated negative sleeves which often include the names of subjects or events Arbus attended enabled us to amend information about some of the photographs We specifically included revisions that offered new insight into her working process this research is ongoing and extends beyond the photographs in this publication we wanted to show examples of all of the types of changes that reflect what we now know from having direct access to the archive Karan's essay is specific to the works in the book but the cataloguing process goes from the beginning to the end of her career Every change could be represented by one or more different objects and the goal was to present the most visually and conceptually revelatory aspects Rachel High: In the book's titular essay you write about Arbus's desire to see "the divineness in ordinary things." This is also reflected in Arbus's notes and papers What are a few images that show her interest in elevating the ordinary Jeff Rosenheim: It's in perhaps all of the pictures but to different degrees One of the things I believe many will respond to is her use of light she can illuminate the space in a purely photographic way It's not only evocative but it can be rather beautiful There's a great picture of a woman in her kitchen Pretty much every other photographer would have put their back to the window and photographed the light hitting the subject's face but Arbus allowed the light to come in behind the figure There are all sorts of other ways she highlights the divineness in ordinary things I feel like she understood how photographs are both real and magical Even the light bulb in the image of The Backwards Man conveys a particularly deep and poetic understanding of space A painter controls every square inch of canvas and we generally don't give photographers credit for that Karan Rinaldo: She enters spaces differently in ways people weren't always accustomed to she entered their space—whether it was their personal space on the street or a more private She interacts with her subjects on a different level Rachel High: That is discussed at length in the book Could you elaborate on the evolution of Arbus's engagement with her subject in these early images Jeff Rosenheim: When she went out on the street she was already a very keen observer of those public and private spaces in her own life but when she started photographing on the street She wanted her subjects to know that she was there but she was interested in making a picture only at the moment when her subject has seen her and responded to her She waited until that moment and then often immediately moved onto the next subject Within the first 50 rolls of film she discovered something about being an artist in a public space that fueled her for the rest of her life Soon she wanted even more of a connection to the subject and she began to get to know her subjects and make multiple images of them Karan Rinaldo: Portraiture is perhaps too narrow a term but within the genre of street photography with which she is often associated her approach is distinctive—she's making portraits on the street Even when she's photographing an empty snack bar or a facade in Hollywood Jeff Rosenheim: She also found a way to make portraits that aren't about vanity didn't like conventional portraiture because almost all portraits at the time were posed vanity pictures but Arbus gets the subjects to reveal themselves with the mask off Walker Evans photographed people in the subway with a hidden camera claiming "The guard is down and the mask is off even more than when in lone bedrooms People's faces are in naked repose down in the subway." Arbus found a way to capture this nakedness even when the subject is aware and participating Related Linksdiane arbus: in the beginning on view at The Met Breuer through November 27 The Met Store: diane arbus: in the beginning “is to go where I’ve never been.” As Arthur Lubow’s deeply researched she was not just speaking about her photography The book is punctuated by revelations about her private life that she had a fitful but prolonged incestuous relationship with her beloved older brother Read moreIf Arbus’s instinct for the perverse was evident even in her early photographs Model sharpened her gaze and the Diane Arbus we now know and continue to be intrigued and disturbed by She firmly believed that “there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them” it is really her way of seeing them – the tension that exists in her images between the empathetic and the exploitative – that draws us in and makes us complicit in her transgressive art the mentally deficient and the obsessively exhibitionist but also people she encountered on the street who caught her eye with their aura of otherness One such passing subject was the young Colin Wood, immortalised by her in a dramatic portrait entitled Child With a Toy Grenade in Central Park in which he looks deranged while clutching his tiny replica bomb Lubow tracked him down and found that he too was complicit in the myth Arbus had created for him: “She saw in me the frustration the kid wanting to explode but can’t because he’s constrained by his background.” You could say that she saw in him her younger self in all the other images in the contact sheet The deceptive art of photography also allowed her to create images that complied with her neuroses: about life Unlike many critics who expressed distaste for her work but people who had been somehow elevated by being different “Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience,” she once remarked They’re aristocrats.” Her need to photograph them speaks of a deeper desire to remake herself and to be accepted as a self-styled outsider by people who they remain to an unavoidable degree objects of our fascination some of the most powerful photographic portraits ever made It was the New Documents exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1967 that propelled Arbus into the public eye Lubow does not mention one of the most memorably telling details in Bosworth’s biography gallery staff had to clean the glass covering the photographs because members of the public had spat on them Diane Arbus took her own life by swallowing barbiturates and cutting her wrists with a razor blade She was 48 and had perhaps exhausted her appetite for the strange and the sordid Depression had stalked her throughout her life so it may have been that she had also grown fatigued with herself and her neurotic demons What emerges most forcefully from Lubov’s long portrait is not just the all-consuming nature of Diane Arbus’s dark creative vision but what it cost to obsessively pursue and yet be so dissatisfied by its relentless demands Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer is published by Jonathan Cape (£35). Click here to buy it for £28.70 This is the archive of The Observer up until 21/04/2025 The Observer is now owned and operated by Tortoise Media put on just a year after she killed herself at age 48 wondering whether the pictures—many of them featuring circus sideshow “freaks,” female impersonators some full frontal and close up—would zap the same jolt that they did 50 years ago They didn’t deliver on that front; we’ve since seen too many photos of naked transgressors the strange mix of sensations—apprehension and wonder—that many of these pictures still deliver but they resonate as much with our own time as with any and Garry Winogrand (who were also little known at the time) another circus performer for longer than that before she snapped the utterly beguiling “Mexican Dwarf in His Hotel Room It’s this hard-won intimacy that makes Arbus’ photos so compelling She robs viewers of their customary distance; we are drawn into the subjects’ lives—we are complicit in the relationship between the subjects and Arbus—whether we like it or not Some of those who didn’t like Arbus’ work really didn’t like it. MoMA first showed three of Arbus’ portraits in 1965, as part of a “Recent Acquisitions” show. Two of the photos were of female impersonators, one was of a nudist family. An assistant in the museum’s photo department told Patricia Bosworth that he had to come in early every morning to wipe the spit that viewers had sprayed on her pictures the day before “there are things nobody would see unless I photographed them.” Her fascination with unbeaten paths—the paths that most of us avoid—stemmed from a broader personal rebellion. She grew up on Central Park West, the daughter of a furrier, and wasn’t comfortable with her privileges. “One of the things I suffered from as a kid,” she later said a painful one.” Once she was old enough to go around the city on her own “I was born way up the ladder of middle-class respectability and I’ve been clambering down as far as I could ever since.” When she first became intrigued with circus “freaks,” she called Joseph Mitchell who’d written a few profiles of that scene I told her that freaks can be boring and ordinary as so-called ‘normal’ people I told her what I found interesting about Olga was that she yearned to be a stenographer and kept geraniums on her window sill.” “She was fascinated by people who were visibly creating their own identities…and by those who were trapped in a uniform that no longer provided any security or comfort.” Some critics at the time understood this. Others did not. Susan Sontag was among the latter In an essay about MoMA’s 1972 retrospective A large part of the mystery of Arbus’ photographs lies in what they suggest about how her subjects felt after consenting to be photographed It seems as if they don’t… [Most of them] don’t know (or don’t appear to know) that they are ugly… In most Arbus pictures the subjects are looking straight into the camera This may be one of the shallowest essays ever written by any otherwise brilliant critic not so much because it’s offensive (though Sontag is far more callous toward Arbus’ subjects than she accuses Arbus of being) the disturbing—thing about Arbus’ photographs of “freaks” is they don’t look freakish or no more so than many of her portraits of “normal” people The point—Arbus’ point—is that all of us are freakish in some way That’s what is unsettling about a Diane Arbus show. It was also what some of her more famous subjects found unsettling about being a Diane Arbus subject, especially since she’d made them so comfortable during the photo shoot. Norman Mailer spreading his legs and crowing a cocky expression in a picture she took for a New York Times profile “Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like giving a hand grenade to a baby.” Yet the great photographer Walker Evans “You actually get a sense of what it’s like to be Norman.” Then there’s the case of Colin Wood, who, at age 7, posed for “Child with a Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, NYC, 1962.” The boy looks hyperactive, a bit deranged. The contact sheets (reproduced in a book called Diane Arbus Documents published by Zwirner gallery on the occasion of its exhibition) show several shots where he’s just merrily jumping around; Arbus chose the most disturbing shot but when a Washington Post reporter tracked him down on the occasion of an Arbus retrospective in 2005 Wood—then a 50-year-old insurance salesman—understood and there was a general feeling of loneliness… I was just exploding It’s all people who want to connect but don’t know how to connect And I think that’s how she felt about herself and she used her camera as a means of transcendence—and a shield—in her own explorations Throughout her life she suffered periodically from depression which was exacerbated by her divorce and by two bouts of hepatitis reportedly with some of her subjects and at times with total strangers She told her psychiatrist—whose notes are quoted in Lubow’s biography—that she had an incestuous relationship with her brother from the time they were children till well into adulthood We don’t know why Arbus committed suicide when she did her back-and-forth letters with a museum director haggling over whether she should get paid $600 or $750 for 20 of her prints The prints on display at the Zwirner gallery now are priced from $10,000 to $175,000 each for those printed posthumously—from $40,000 to just under $1 million for those printed by Arbus herself published by Aperture (MoMA didn’t want to publish it) and still in print This is what makes the Zwirner gallery’s revival of the show so valuable that Diane Arbus was one of the most significant cultural figures of the mid 20th century and now—a truly great and humane artist She was one of a number of photographers who asked me for a private sitting By May I had acquired a New York boyfriend who urged me to let one of his friends photograph me and I hated the whole rigmarole so I tried to wriggle out of it but what he worked at was taking candid photographs of New York street life with the Nikon he kept beside him on the front seat of his yellow cab Arbus also worked as a street photographer like the ones of the 1940s who used to snap people as they walked past and then run up and offer them a card so they could buy the snapshot if they wanted to except Arbus didn't offer her subjects a card and didn't let them see the pictures You have only to look at the contact sheets included by her daughter Doon Arbus in Diane Arbus: Revelations to see the street photographer at work with her Rolleiflex and flash A lot of nonsense is talked about Arbus's empathy with her subjects; what is mirrored on most of those faces is faint bewilderment and timid resentment The subjects have no names because Arbus neither knew nor cared who they were I'm not sure whether David was on my side or whether he was more concerned to ingratiate himself with Arbus Arbus had never allowed any of her subjects to look good For the years that she worked with her husband as the stylist for his glamour photographs she had had no option but to make beautiful people look more beautiful It was said that she was the best stylist in the business Once the marriage broke down and Arbus struck out on her own there was to be no more making people look their best Maybe David thought he would learn something by watching Arbus at work as soon as they were both in my room in the Chelsea hotel She couldn't work with other people in the room She seemed too birdlike and delicate to be lugging her outsize camera bag on such a warm day Her thin cheeks were red with exertion and her fine fairish hair stood out around her face in wisps I asked her whether she would like a rest or refreshment or something of the sort Throughout the session she spoke very little and always in a deceptively apologetic murmur as she ferretted in the big bag and patted her many pockets Clutching the camera she climbed on to the bed and straddled me moving up until she was kneeling with a knee on both sides of my chest She held the Rolleiflex at waist height with the lens right in my face She bent her head to look through the viewfinder on top of the camera In her viewfinder I must have looked like a guppy or like one of the unfortunate babies into whose faces Arbus used to poke her lens so that their snotty tear-stained features filled her picture frame (eg I knew that at that distance anybody's face would have more pores than features I was wearing no make-up and hadn't even had time to wash my face or comb my hair Pinned on the bed by her small body with the big camera in my face I felt my claustrophobia kick in; my heart-rate accelerated and I began to wheeze I understood that as soon as I exhibited any signs of distress She would have got behind the public persona of Life cover-girl Germaine Greer the "sexy feminist that men like" I concentrated on breathing deeply and slowly If it was humanly possible I would stop my very pupils from dilating Immobilised between her knees I denied her put the camera back in her bag and buggered off A few weeks later she took an overdose of barbiturates and slit her wrists According to John Szarkowski, then director of the Department of Photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art "Her real subject is no less than the unique interior lives of those she photographed." As if you could penetrate the interior life of a stranger by kneeling astride her and shoving a lens up her nose It's Szarkowski's kind of mindless nonsense about what Arbus was really up to that obscures her genuine achievement Interior life is probably not any photographer's subject; it was certainly not hers In Arbus's hands everyone is en travesti; even women appear as female impersonators She may have thought she was getting the mask off but what she was photographing was actually the clumsy ill-drawn mask itself Arbus has been credited with stunning originality in her daring choice of subject as if the tradition of portraying freaks were not as old as photography Her Three Russian Midget Friends In A Living Room On 100th St of 1963 treats the subject exactly the same way as hundreds of commercial photographers before her perching the little people on full-size furniture so their feet hardly touch the floor Her vision developed little between 1963 and 1970 when she treated A Jewish Giant At Home With His Parents In The Bronx in a very similar way though this time she emphasised the giant's outline with the black shadow thrown by the flash If I'd thought Arbus felt compassion for me I'd have socked her Though formally Arbus is within the tradition of freak photography there is an important difference between her and her predecessors like the Eisenmann Studio or Obermann and Kern bearded women and dog-faced boys whose photographs appear on thousands of postcards were all professionals Often the notes on the postcards spoke of them as well-educated and happily married Arbus's nameless subjects are denied such confederacy and performativity She often uses the devices of the older tradition in her treatment of otherwise unremarkable subjects NJ of 1967 are posed as if they were joined at the shoulder and hip and had only three arms between them She reduced her subjects to generic phenomena by the names she chose for them: Jewish Couple My ordeal resulted in a picture called Feminist In Hotel Room No permission for the reproduction of what is an undeniably bad picture was ever requested The language Arbus uses about her photographic practice is revealing: "Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot It was one of the first things I photographed and it had a terrific kind of excitement for me I still do adore some of them." "Freaks" (a word 21st-century sensibility finds hard to use) is "a thing" a medium for her use that Arbus finds quite distinct from herself This insensibility Arbus shares with her contemporary and fellow New Yorker Though he was happy to exploit a cast of exhibitionists in the multimedia freak show called the Factory Warhol never regarded himself as one of them Like Arbus he was outwardly practically mute evasive and completely indecisive; inwardly he was ruthless The emotion that thrills through every Arbus icon making them haunting and unforgettable is a relentless She is wearing nothing but a petalled bathing hat elaborate swan-shaped sunglasses outlined in rhinestones She stands in a timid parody of a model's pose The skin of her thigh is mottled as if she is cold Against the unrelievedly dark background she is as white as a maggot I have seen photographs of maggots that have shown more fellow feeling The pretty lady would have looked far less ridiculous if the picture had been called After The Swim or La Baigneuse or if Arbus had stopped it down a touch and relieved the harshness of the contrast To say that Arbus's creativity was driven by disgust is not to dismiss her as an artist It is a curiously moralistic view of art that says it cannot be generated by negative emotion but their despair and indignation ought to be called forth by something more sinister than mere human imperfection and self-delusion Arbus is not an artist who makes us see the world anew; she embeds us in our own limitations Hers is a world without horizons where there is no escape from self I had a chance to speak with NYC based photographer Sally Davies about her work.. Becker: You mentioned that you were a painter when did painting end for you and photography begin Davies: I was a painting major with a photo minor at college I think my father gave me my first camera when I was about 15 I exhibited at OK Harris and Gracie Mansion Gallery as a painter in the 90s As that decade came to a close I was looking for some fun They ended up as large scale photographs with Alien figurines in Barbie clothes I had my first solo show of those photographs in 2000 at Gracie Mansion and it sold out That told me it was OK to continue photographing I painted for a few more years after that took a total break from painting and started photographing every day on purpose Becker: You take a lot of iconic photos of New York What's your history in New York and what do you like about making images of the city Davies: I moved to NYC’s East Village in 1983 to finish college It was a different place back then but I managed to photograph my way through the insanity Then I had a fire in my loft on Ave A in the 90s and lost all my negatives except a very few A lot of downtown visual history went up in flames that day Unfortunate stuff happens to all of us in life We can throw in the towel or we suck it up and keep going I photograph New York City because I live here I have been spending a lot of time in LA this past couple of years I think thats what all artists are doing in their own way Becker: I've seen your celebrity portraits of people like the musician Sting Were you making these for magazines or are they kind of both commercial and personal and Sting for the Elvis Costello TV Show “Spectacle” So that was a commercial shoot for hire gig A good portrait is telling two stories at the same time; mine and the subjects is it being gentrified to the point of being over Davies: If you want things to be like they were before But if you understand that it was changing- even when you didn’t know it was My parents talked about the “the old days” when I was a kid I couldn’t imagine the world as they remembered it A 25 year old cannot imagine the east village as it was in 1983 but they will have their own experience They are going to lose the life they have now Are you inspired by photographers or something else Davies: The old photo guard continues to remind me whats good: Diane Arbus All artists inspire me: musicians -Tom Waits Maybe get some peyote and do some time traveling Becker's new album of original music "Mode For Noah" was released in 2023.  The photographer’s largely unseen set of 1960s photos focusing on outcasts of society is now on view at the Smithsonian In 1970, Diane Arbus was a struggling magazine photographer in New York City. She wanted to make more money, so she put together a series of photos in a plexiglass box, which she called “A box of ten photographs by Diane Arbus”, priced at $1,000. Read moreThe photos highlight the outcasts of American society, such as giants, dwarves and transvestites. Arbus’s photos shocked and disgusted art crowds to the point they were spat on when exhibited As Norman Mailer observed: “Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.” This controversial series, taken from 1962 to 1967, are now on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC. Diane Arbus: A box of ten photographs showcases the original photo series – which was purchased from GH Dalsheimer Gallery in 1986 – alongside accompanying ephemera that traces Arbus’s meteoric rise to fame as an art star “I was amazed by this body of work, which I had never seen before,” said John Jacob the curator of the exhibition who stumbled upon Arbus’s series in storage The series features a photo of identical twins from New Jersey named Cathleen and Coleen Wade, from 1967, which inspired the twin ghosts in Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining, was referenced in Harmony Korine’s movie Gummo and was recreated by photographer Sandro Miller, with John Malkovich as the model “She put a camera between those bare breasts and photographed those nudists.” a Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx The 1970 photo inspired Carmel’s cousin to make an audio documentary about him in 1999 A print of this photo was sold at auction for $421,000 in 2007 Though she was a modestly recognized magazine photographer trying make it in the art world she was part of a small community of photographers trying to have their photos taken seriously “Photography in contemporary art today came from Diane Arbus she crossed the bridge first from editorial to the museum world,” said Jacob “She is a pioneer who opened the door of the photograph being a fine artwork that is collectible.” Arbus was known for pushing the traditional boundaries of portraiture to include people who were not accepted in the mainstream. Art critic Susan Sontag wrote of her photographic subjects that they were “pathetic “My photos are proof that something was there This series was special because Arbus curated everything about it she worked with art directors – they created a narrative out of her work,” said Jacob “This was the only time she selected her own images it’s a range of subject matter of her known and some less-known pictures.” While the series was meant to be an edition of 50 there were only four editions created before Arbus took her own life in 1971 at age 48 The four were sold to prominent artists and art directors this is the only one held in a public museum,” said Jacob “This is the first time it’s been looked at as a portfolio in a public space; our set is the only one she made sold and gave to a person who was a friend Diane Arbus Photograph: The Estate of Diane ArbusThe three-room exhibition features more than 50 pieces of ephemera She shares her excitement of the photos in letters written to her husband where she tries to convince them to buy the box but an important one to help us understand how we look at photography today,” said Jacob Sadly, Arbus didn’t live to see the success of how far these 10 photos took her. “It was a story that went untold, until now,” said Jacob. “This portfolio was the big bang in her career. Even though she is no longer with us, her work is taking on new proportions.” This article was amended on 9 April 2018. The original said that Arbus’s photographs were “not hailed” by Susan Sontag. Paul David Young is a playwright, translator, and critic. www.pauldavidyoung.com Home the other day to see the retrospective of Diane Arbus photographs The first picture one sees upon entering is titled “A Very Young Baby 1968.” Cooper was particularly interested in this picture “I remember reading some critic saying that it resembled a Roman death mask,” Cooper said peering at the print while hoisting and sometimes gently bouncing his own seven-month-old baby “I didn’t really know much about Roman death masks “Very Young Baby” is surrounded by photographs of giants circus “freaks,” street people—all sorts of outcasts and eccentrics My goal is always to lead an interesting life I got a good kick start.” He looked around The Zwirner show is a re-creation of the Museum of Modern Art’s Arbus retrospective of 1972 Cooper doesn’t remember (he was only five in 1972) but he figures that he must have attended that show His parents went—he found the invitation among his mother’s papers—and he thinks that they would have taken him and his brother along His parents were the writer Wyatt Cooper and the designer Gloria Vanderbilt “They wanted me and my brother to be involved in their lives,” Cooper said “There was no kids’ table.” They hosted the first dinner for Charlie Chaplin when he returned to New York from exile in 1972 and Cooper remembers shaking Chaplin’s hand (maybe because the Times ran a photo of him doing so) when Arbus went to the apartment on the Upper East Side to photograph Vanderbilt and her husband as they got dressed for Truman Capote’s black-and-white ball so I like to think I’m in more than just one Arbus print,” Cooper said noting that he found them after his mother died when he started rummaging through her boxes of papers One letter from Arbus to Vanderbilt begins: “I printed this for you last spring but I forgot about it until I heard about your new baby.” She was referring to a picture she’d taken of Cooper’s older brother “Also I have something beautiful to ask you about I’ve become obsessed with photographing new babies.” Arbus asked if she could photograph baby Anderson The image that resulted appeared in Harper’s Bazaar Arbus selected the most striking and disturbing image from the session but I thought you should have it.” In fact “There was a book about Arbus that says my mom didn’t want my name used in the magazine when the photograph was published Cooper now has that photo—the only signed print of “A Very Young Baby”—under museum glass ‘Your lips look exactly the same today.’ ” (So do his eyebrows.) He continued “As I go through my mother’s files and find more letters from Arbus Looking at Arbus’s shots of rich people dressed up for a party “The portrayal of the partygoers seems to have more commentary comparing them with Arbus’s images of the marginalized A fellow gallery-goer quoted a critic who once said that Arbus showed the normality of freakishness and the freakishness of normality “The freakishness of normality—I guess that’s my category.” ♦ An earlier version of this article included an incomplete version of the title of the photograph featuring Anderson Cooper as a baby A long-ago crime, suddenly remembered A limousine driver watches her passengers transform The day Muhammad Ali punched me What is it like to be keenly intelligent but deeply alienated from simple emotions? Temple Grandin knows The harsh realm of “gentle parenting.”  Retirement the Margaritaville way Fiction by F. Scott Fitzgerald: “Thank You for the Light.”  Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker. making pictures of circus and sideshow "freaks" many of whom she formed lasting friendships with If Arbus undoubtedly felt at home among the outsiders she photographed she also experienced a frisson of guilty pleasure when photographing them "There's some thrill in going to a sideshow," she once confessed of her nocturnal visits to the circus tents of Coney Island where performers were still earning a living in the 1960s "I felt a mixture of shame and awe." Her works make us question not just her motives for looking at what the critic Susan Sontag – with typical hauteur – called "people who are pathetic, pitiable, as well as repulsive", but also our own. In perhaps the most angry essay in her book On Photography Sontag insists that Arbus's gaze is "based on distance on a feeling that what the viewer is asked to look at is really other" The "other" is not what it used to be whether in voyeuristic TV shows about "embarrassing bodies" or documentaries about sexual exhibitionists or conjoined twins Arbus's black-and-white portraits – particularly of those with mental disabilities or physical abnormalities – retain their power to unsettle and disturb the cruel often seems to outweigh the tender her portraits always send us back to Arbus: to her need to not just photograph but befriend her subjects; her seemingly insatiable fascination with the unusual; her often fragile state of mind (She killed herself for reasons that remain mysterious.) Later this year a new biography, entitled Diane Arbus: An Emergency in Slow Motion a professor of psychology at Pacific University who specialises in what he calls "psychobiography" as with Patricia Bosworth's celebrated book about the photographer it is the life – and mind – of the artist that is being probed in an attempt to shed some light on the photographs Schultz spoke at length to Arbus's therapist did not go down well with the famously controlling Arbus estate who that any attempt to interpret the art diminishes the art" "She was a great humanist photographer who was at the forefront of a new kind of photographic art." I would agree with the latter half of that sentence while disagreeing with the former as the great American critic and curator John Szarkowski recognised when he first showed her work in his New Documents group exhibition at Moma in New York in 1967 was certainly a trailblazer of a new photographic aesthetic Only if your view of humanity is essentially pessimistic and tinged with neurotic narcissism Arbus may have felt an enormous empathy with the people she photographed however much she identified with their outsider status The work she left behind remains powerful not just because of its dark formal beauty or its stark vision but because it asks questions of the viewer about the limits of looking about the vicariousness and predatory nature of photography we cannot help feeling that we are intruders or voyeurs even though her subjects are tied to a time and place that has all but vanished A sense of complicity – hers and ours – lies at the very heart of her power Her images hold us in their sway even when our better instincts tell us to look away Perhaps her greatest gift is that she understood that conflict instinctively and did more than anyone to exploit it artistically Sean O'Hagan is the 2011 winner of the Royal Photographic Society's J Dudley Johnston award The award recognises achievement in the field of photographic criticism Above the Fold Document asks a photographer about the unseen story of a frame that defines their work and he passed away not long after that from the usual early 80s disease There’s so much of him in the photograph Most of the pictures I was doing for the Village Voice were taken of whomever I found on the street or in interesting clothing stores What was so challenging was how to find the best background the best lighting and the best situation in the matter of minutes I knew that I was interested in the back of Julio’s outfit When I noticed the little shape that echoed the shape of a person I was really excited that the people I call the “photo Gods” had shined down on me Around this time I had figured out that I was documenting a scene Susanne Bartsch led She threw parties at local clubs and invited all these young extremely creative kids that were artists of some kind It started to dawn on me that the camera was my ticket into meeting all these people that I wouldn’t normally have the guts to talk to People whom I was completely intrigued by.In retrospect I was documenting a time and a scene that was particularly wonderful and creative time despite the political situation and the fact of AIDS being so terrifying It was a very upbeat moment and money was not necessary for these people to live and create it was so much fun to take pictures of people because they were never suspicious To be in the Village Voice was a very cool thing I’ve been waiting for you to walk by and stop me!” Or sometimes they’d say can we do it another time when I have my better outfit on?” Drawing attention to yourself in those days was a calling card I’m different and this will show you If you’re interested in what you see There’s some sort of irony that I haven’t figured out The more repressed our society is getting because of who’s in power it ends up forcing people to come out and protest and be different and make statements Made famous for her work as a street style photographer for the Village Voice recently returned to the streets of New York City to capture the styles of people during a period of resistance In his classic study of the short story “The Lonely Voice,” the Irish writer Frank O’Connor identified the primary difference between the novel and the short story as one of belonging are about people trying to fit into society those to whom society “offers no goals and no answers” and for whom the short story’s “intense awareness of human loneliness” is perfectly suited From practically the moment that the commercial photographer Diane Arbus set out to become an artist at the ripe age of 33 — numbering her negatives sequentially from 1 to more than 6,000 before her suicide in 1971 — she seemed to know that the story of the outsider was her intellectual inheritance to isolate even those who thought they belonged their eyes searching hers — later ours — fiercely and uncertainly through the camera a highly anticipated and unauthorized biography by Arthur Lubow that delves deeply into the connections between Arbus’s work and her sometimes troubled life in interviews with many friends who have never before spoken publicly about her the curator in charge of the museum’s photography department and organizer of the Arbus exhibition sat down at the Metropolitan Museum last week to talk about the years of work that led to the show and about Arbus’s remarkable conviction of what she called her own kind of “rightness and wrongness.” “so I try to be as good as I can to make things even.” It seems amazing that so much work by an artist of Arbus’s stature could go largely unknown for so many years Why has it taken so long for it to come to light the square-format pictures we know so well Arbus had a darkroom separate from her home at Westbeth in the West Village and there were lots of boxes that had been hidden away there They weren’t found until years later and not inventoried until many years later What was your reaction when you started going through the prints yourself for the first time ROSENHEIM I thought that the work had such authority And that the genesis of this artist was something I didn’t know anything about And wouldn’t it be interesting to see what this looked like and compare it to the larger whole And the two are much more connected than you could ever imagine The opportunity is to look at the poetics of a great artist at the beginning of her career or for that matter Robert Frank or Helen Levitt or Lee Friedlander or Garry Winogrand they are very different from their middles and their ends And Arbus’s work is really just one beautiful thing How does it look and feel like Arbus (of whom Norman Mailer once said that giving a camera to her was like giving a hand grenade to a baby) even in the first images The style of documentary photography was that you wanted to see but you didn’t want to be seen and Arbus had a completely different method It was to use the camera as an expressive device that allows the viewer of the photograph to be implicated by the subject looking directly at the artist ROSENHEIM I think Arbus was suggesting that just as people are looking at us and we’re looking at them every day the pictures made us introspective as viewers They forced us to confront our own identity We’re looking at somebody else but we’re mindful of our voyeurism and we’re mindful of how we ourselves are presenting How did I become the person I am?’ That’s one of the qualifying elements of an Arbus photograph: that you feel something about you often something that might not be comfortable The longtime criticism of Arbus, by Susan Sontag among others was that she was often producing that effect — her art — at the expense of her subjects the sideshow freaks and cross-dressers she sought out Will this show change anyone’s mind about that ROSENHEIM I feel that when I look at these pictures the effect is of the gaze that people strike when they catch a glimpse of themselves in a picture window or a mirror when they’re not expecting it It’s their split-second performative response to themselves And I think in a certain sense each of her subjects seemed to gain some self-knowledge from that experience the experience of being photographed by Arbus A picture caption in an earlier version of this article misidentified a publication where one of Diane Arbus’s images appeared in 1963 Her latest biographer notes that observation in his book Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer by Arthur Lubow When we think of Diane Arbus (1923-1971), and a lot of us will be thinking of her given that there is both a new biography and a much-anticipated exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York we inevitably see the subjects of her photographs odd characters under the broad umbrella of what the public viewed as “freaks.” a Jewish giant in the Bronx with his parents a young man with a cigarette and his hair in curlers and asylum patients roaming the meadows of New Jersey Even in today’s era of image overproduction these are the pictures that still stay with us – a half-century after Arbus took them Arbus understood the shock of making us stare into unfamiliar she would frighten beautiful women who posed for her into anger and dread whom she photographed with his legs splayed apart said that “giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like giving a hand grenade to a baby.” Yet she also made outcasts comfortable or at least comfortable enough to have their pictures taken The central odd character in Arthur Lubow’s new biography is Arbus herself – waifish and adventurous – the creature we see in Ted Papageorge’s photograph on the book’s cover one of many places she habitually looked for subjects In Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer What we learn here goes far beyond anything her pictures suggested Lubow uses that observation as the epigram for his book Central among those secrets is her suicide at the age of 48 in 1971 the reasons for which remain the subject of speculation all the more mysterious given that her work supplies a road map of clues the photographs obscure as much as they explain (the Diane Arbus estate denied him the right to publish any of her pictures in his book) the biographer finds himself forced into exploring the secrets of photographs that he’s been banned from showing It’s been well-established that Arbus’s life generated plenty of drama Diane Nemerov was born in 1923 into a wealthy Jewish family that found success selling furs and fashion at Russek’s department store on Fifth Avenue But her father was a gambler and philanderer who didn’t leave much money behind after the business failed a private school run by the secular Ethical Culture Society who in 1978 would win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry artistic brilliance would be overshadowed by painful self-doubt and emotional perversity Lubow reports that the two siblings felt an intense rivalry with each other yet carried on a sexual relationship until shortly before Diane killed herself The young woman started in photography in a partnership with her husband an employee at her father’s department store She married at 17 and the two made a living as fashion photographers which may surprise those who pigeon-hole the enigmatic Diane Arbus as an observer of people branded as “freaks.” Two of her closest friends were models Her job was to style the models for photographs that Allan took Diane Arbus complained about being required to photograph people wearing clothes that didn’t belong to them She and her husband anguished over money – her parents didn’t leave her much She also anguished over whether her pictures had any artistic value Photography was barely recognized as an art in the 1950’s when Arbus found herself supporting two daughters as a divorced mother Photographers were grateful to get lucrative fashion or commercial work Even Robert Frank (The Americans) survived on it Arbus wandered out in search of other subjects – strangers in the park Lubow never lets us forget that the observant Arbus was also already on the prowl for sex whether it was with strangers in buses and movie theaters or with the men whom she met through work that she never turned down a man who wanted to sleep with her it is surprising that we don’t hear from many of them — much of what we do learn comes from someone who heard something from someone Much of this gossip has been reported before Arbus took vast numbers of pictures for herself who begins his long study with an overdramatized scene depicting her decision to abandon fashion photography notes that much of her work throughout her career was done on assignment often began as journalistic assignments for magazines such Esquire or the London Times Many of the ideas that she pitched to her editors were rejected Some sessions because difficult because she could be as weird as her subjects carrying a paper bag instead of a purse and talking about sex constantly It’s tempting to dismiss Arbus’s financial constraints at that time as the struggles of a poor little rich girl She was born into wealth and even during rough periods she lived comfortably by New York standards The apartment in the Westbeth artists’ building Yet Lubow cites the fees that she earned to show how little anyone paid for photography back then When Arbus tried to sell individual prints to a handful of collectors in the few years before her death Museums often told her they couldn’t even afford that price When it came to finding sexual adventures Arbus was unfailingly enterprising — selling her work wasn’t among her strengths This was the absurd plight of an artist whose pictures were recognized at the Museum of Modern Art in a 1967 exhibition “New Documents,” that featured three young photographers – Diane Arbus Arbus was at work on another show for MoMA — researching vernacular news photographs — when she took tranquilizers and slit her wrists in Westbeth in July of 1971 sexual adventurism and struggles with money that were already well-examined in a 1984 biography of Arbus by Patricia Bosworth At more than twice the length of that earlier book (We have to make due with descriptions.) Lubow examines Arbus’s work perceptively in the context of her teachers talks about the influence of masters such as August Sander and evaluated her photography alongside contemporaries Robert Frank has no choice but to seek out a book with photographs that the Arbus estate authorized the catalog for a traveling exhibition that began at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2003 (Arbus can also be seen and heard in a 30-minute documentary made in the year after her death and her insistent voice has a haunting restlessness in a 45-minute interview with Studs Terkel.) Lubow delivers some new information (actually exhuming unreported testimony) from Arbus’s conversations with her psychotherapist Helen Boigon in the years before her death (These exchanges are taken from Patricia Bosworth’s notes) Here’s an example – “She was obsessed with sex the way a fat person is compulsively obsessed with food,” Boigon told Bosworth “He stuffs himself and stuffs himself and is never satisfied She could not connect with anyone or anything We’re not told why Bosworth left that information out of her biography or why a therapist spoke of a former patient with such indiscretion including a wild description of Arbus trying to seduce her The notes from conversations with Boigon also indicate that Arbus caught up in a maelstrom of anxiety and money woes was anguished over her relationship with Marvin Israel an art director who supported her work at Harper’s Bazaar and Lubow reports that he eventually took up with Arbus’s daughter Picturing that arrangement comes off as jolting as any Arbus photograph It was Israel who sent Arbus to a psychiatrist to “deflect her demands.” He shared a multi-story aerie overlooking 5th Avenue in the Flatiron District with his wife and a cat named Mouse – a stage perfectly set for melodrama A merciless critic as well as a guide for the needy photographer Israel knew Arbus’s work as well as anyone and would assemble the most refined presentation of her pictures ever published If Israel is the Svengali/Salieri figure in Lubow’s biography the role of fatherly mentor goes to John Szarkowski of MoMA’s photography department who first acquired Arbus’ work in 1964 and organized a posthumous retrospective in 1972 There’s a puzzling observation from Szarkowski which comes after Arbus reflects on her experiences taking photographs of asylum patients in New Jersey whom she visualized in white tunics and festive costumes against a background of expansive skies The pictures offer rare glimpses of nature in her work and — uncharacteristically — her subjects seem at peace with themselves “she was never a very depressed person in my presence.” More than anyone he provided Arbus with the assurance that she seemed to need plus the recognition that came from being shown at MoMA and the income earned by her research for her upcoming exhibition on news photography drawn from city tabloids The professional reinforcement wasn’t enough Others close to Arbus saw her usual restlessness turn more than a little desperate The reasons behind her demise would be her ultimate secret tantalizing legacy of inscrutability that unites her life and her pictures is a programmer for the Haifa International Film Festival in Israel about the fight over a Nazi-looted painting found at The Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan Δdocument.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value" The Lady’s Dressing Room (1732) BY JONATHAN SWIFT Five hours (and who can do it less in?) 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