Artist Profile

Diane Arbus, American Photographer (1923-1971)

Diane Arbus, born Diane Nemerov in New York City on March 14, 1923, is considered one of the pioneers of a “new” documentary photography style, displaying everyday life and people in what is considered a ruthless and unrelenting manner.  Of her work she said, “What I’m trying to describe is that it’s impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else’s.  That somebody else’s tragedy is not the same as your own.”  This concerned the fact that many of her human subjects were physically unusual, and about that she said, “Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. (These people) were born with their trauma.  They’ve already passed their test in life.  They’re aristocrats.”

Diane Arbus was raised with all the privileges of wealth and had lived in an environment of richness (Central Park West), attending the best progressive schools in New York.  (Among her classmates was photo-historian Naomi Rosenblum.)  Despite her life of privilege, Diane was overshadowed by her brother, poet Howard Nemerov, well known in the world of writing.

Diane rejected the safety and security of her comfortable upbringing.  At 14 years of age, she fell in love with Allan Arbus, who at the time was 19.  Against her parents objections she continued the love affair until her 18^th birthday.  Days later the couple was married.

To fulfill his military obligation, Allan Arbus was a photographer with the New Jersey Signal Corps and attended photo school.  At night he came home and told Diane what he had learned; and like many beginners in photography, they set up a darkroom in their bathroom.  After the war ended, Allan and Diane started a business together as fashion photographers. Allan was the photographer, while Diane acted as stylist.  She soon garnered a reputation for being one of the best in the business.  Allan was unwilling to let Diane develop her own recognition by taking her own photographs - he being of the school that believed women should be wives, raise children and support their husbands.  Diane began to develop her style and take her own photos only after her marriage to Allan began to disintegrate because she needed to find a way to support herself and her two children.  By 1958 she was seriously pursuing her career and began her series of portraits of people on the fringes of society.

It is these photographs for which Diane Arbus is most remembered.  Her experience as a photo stylist and her keen eye for drama and visual excitement played vital parts.  She always printed her images in full frame, often with messy edges to emphasize the fact that the images were not cropped.  Arbus interacted with her subjects to achieve a unique closeness, something not done by any of her contemporaries.  She documented the forgotten persons, those ignored by most, often with a bleakness and realism that was frightening.  Her empathy gave her access to the usually unapproachable: transvestites, dwarves, prostitutes, nudists and the everyday ugly.

“I work from awkwardness.  By that I mean I don’t like to arrange things.”  This is evidenced by the images of common items in common settings that seem surreal.  She was a pioneer in the use of flash, choosing to photograph subjects where she found them...bars, on the streets or in clubs. Her technique used flash to discreetly illuminate subjects from their backgrounds, which is now a standard of press photographers.

Throughout her career as photographer for magazines, fashion and ending with art photography, Diane Arbus used her unique view of people and their surroundings.  She chose as her instrument a square medium-format camera rather than one that is held to the eye.  This allowed a casual observation of the subject, perhaps even during conversation, and the ability to select the very second when the subject revealed a moment when he/she looked somehow different or peculiar.  Arbus used a type of post-modern strategy of placing subjects central to the format, ignoring the rules of the time.  “There’s a kind of rightness and wrongness and sometimes I like rightness and sometimes I like wrongness,” Arbus said, and “I don’t know what good composition is....sometimes for me composition has to do with a certain brightness or a certain coming to restfulness.”

And so it was with Diane Arbus.  Despite the intimacy and cooperation she attained with her subjects, despite the success and recognition she had and the fact that her work was in demand, she suffered from deteriorating mental health—serious depression, for which doctors and friends could do nothing.  On July 26, 1971, she took her own life at age 48—a tragic end to a gifted and respected photographic artist.

Just one year prior to her death, Arbus had brought out her first limited edition of 10 pictures.  She had been in three major museum group shows including one at the Museum of Modern Art’s influential exhibition about the “new social landscape” of the 1960's.  Arbus was the first U.S. photographer to be shown at the Venice Biennale (one year after her death) and was considered by critics to be one of the most influential American photographers of the late 20^th century.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, has acquired the complete archive of Diane Arbus and will be the permanent repository of the artist’s negatives, papers, correspondence and library.  The entire collection – which will be preserved, fully catalogued and eventually made available for research to scholars, artists and the general public – will be known as The Diane Arbus Archive.