Diane Arbus

Since the 1972 opening of her first full-scale retrospective, Arbus´s work has challenged prevailing assumptions about everyday life. She used her camera to emphasize what she termed the "flaw" in everyone, and she presented this flaw as a unique quality. Some of her best-known images are icons: identical twins in New Jersey; a "Jewish giant" slouching to fit in a living room sized for his diminutive parents; and a young couple on Hudson Street in New York, their apparent ages riding the pendulum between early adolescence and late middle age.

Arbus always humanized her subjects, creating great portraits that became an allegory of postwar America. In her work, she explored the relationships between appearance and identity, illusion and belief, and theater and reality. The photographs, taken during the 1950s and 1960s, represent her encounters as self-conscious meetings with her subjects. Arbus´s radical approach challenged the tradition of a photographer being as invisible as possible when taking pictures.

Born to a prominent New York retail family, Arbus began to photograph in her teens. She studied with photographer Berenice Abbott, graphic designer Alexey Brodovitch, and, most important, with photographer Lisette Model, before embarking on a career as a magazine and fashion photographer. While collaborating with her husband, Allan, for nearly 10 years, she also pursued her own work. By the early 1960s, she had developed a simple, formal, classical style that has since been recognized as among the most distinctive features of her oeuvre.

Although Arbus traveled around the United States to photograph contests and festivals, and public and private rituals, she found the majority of her subjects in her native New York and its outposts: nudist camps, circuses, amusement parks, and institutions for mentally challenged individuals.

Pressetext

Diane Arbus - Revelations