Diane Arbus

Photographer

• Born: March 14, 1923
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: July 26, 1971
• Place of death: New York, New York

Artist, photographer, and educator

Arbus was aphotographer whose work appeared in major magazines and in art museums. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City described her as the most original and influential American photographer of the twentieth century.

Areas of achievement: Art; photography

Early Life

Diane Arbus (dee-AHN AHR-buhs) was born into a wealthy Jewish family in New York City. She had two siblings; one was Howard Nemerov, who was twice United States Poet Laureate. Her father, David Nemerov, was the son of a Russian immigrant; her mother, Gertrude, was the daughter of the owners of Russek’s Fur Store. After her parents’ marriage, David helped manage Russek’s and oversaw its evolution into a department store that also specialized in furs. The store provided support for the family. Arbus was loved by her parents, but they were distant due to her father’s work and her mother’s depression.

Arbus and her siblings attended the Fieldston School for Ethical Culture in the Bronx. The students were mostly children of affluent, liberal Jews. In art class her paintings stood out, but she had no interest in painting. She graduated but did not attend college.

At age thirteen, Arbus met nineteen-year-old Allan Arbus, an employee in the advertising department of her parents’ store. They quickly fell in love, and they married on April 10, 1941, after Arbus turned eighteen. Her parents gave only grudging assent at first but finally gave their blessing. They had two children, Doon and Amy.

Her husband gave Arbus her first camera. During World War II (1939-1945), he studied photography in the New Jersey Signal Corps. The couple later supported their family as fashion photographers. First they took photographs and created advertisements for Russek’s; later they began a commercial photography business. They did fashion photography for Harper’s Bazaar, Show, Esquire, Glamour, Vogue, and The New York Times. A great deal of Arbus’s most memorable photographs came from her innovative work in magazines, which was artistically striking. In 1956, one photograph was in Edward Steichen’s Family of Man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

Life’s Work

After years of successful fashion photography, Arbus’s work took a major departure. This happened after she met Lisette Model, an Austrian-born documentary photographer. Model became a mentor, and Arbus studied with her at the New School for several years in the 1950’s. Model encouraged Arbus to pursue her personal interests in her photography work. Her husband was supportive, so she left the fashion photography business to him in order to follow another path. In 1959, the couple separated; in 1969, they divorced.

Arbus photographed people in locations such as Coney Island, carnivals, Hubert’s Museum and Flea Circus of Forty-second Street, the dressing rooms of female impersonators, and the streets, cinemas, parks, and buses of Manhattan. She explored subjects that occupied her for much of the rest of her career, including nudists, transvestites, dwarfs, and people with mental or physical disabilities. She mastered the photographic technique of using a square format that emphasized the subject more. Flash lighting added theatricality and surrealism.

In 1960, Esquire published Arbus’s first photo-essay, in which she contrasted privilege and poverty in New York City. Thereafter she made a living as a freelance photographer and photography instructor. In 1959, Arbus met her second mentor, Marvin Israel. In 1961, he became the art director of Harper’s Bazaar and was able to publish her work. She published many of her photographs in Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, and London’s Sunday Times Magazine, sometimes accompanied by her own writing. In 1963 and 1966, Arbus was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships for her project American Rites, Manners, and Customs. By the early1960’s, her commercial portraits for magazines had a distinctive look. The traditional subjects of actors and writers became as strange and troubling as her photographs of more eccentric people. Later she took photos of twins and triplets, families and couples in Central Park, and the uptown and downtown art scenes. Her work was prominent in John Sarkowski’s celebrated New Documents at the Museum of Modern Art.

By 1970, Arbus was a legend among young photographers. That year she won the Robert Levitt Award from the American Society of Magazine Photographers for outstanding achievement. She also began what would be one of the final projects of her career: taking pictures of mentally retarded adults at a home in Vineland, New Jersey. The May, 1971, issue of ArtForum published a portfolio of her pictures.

Arbus suffered from intermittent illness and harsh depression. On a day when she was deeply depressed, she committed suicide at her apartment in the Westbeth Artists Community, Greenwich Village, New York. She was forty-eight years old.

Significance

Arbus produced photographs of eccentric, ordinary, fashionable, and famous people, pushing the limits of photographic art. Her work was shown after her death at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the V & A Museum in London. In 1972, she was the first American photographer to be exhibited at the Venice Biennale. The Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective of her work, the most attended solo photography exhibition in its history. A book that followed was one of the best-selling art books in history. Some of the pictures included a young man in curlers and a Jewish giant at home with his parents. The exhibit by the Museum of Modern Art, which toured the country, and the book of her photographs by Aperture magazine made her one of the most famous photographers in the United States.

Bibliography

Arbus, Diane. Revelations. New York: Random House, 2003. With many previously unpublished photographs and excerpts from her letters and notebooks, this book provides an autobiographical glimpse of Arbus.

Arbus, Diane, Doon Arbus, and Yolanda Cuomo. Diane Arbus: Untitled. New York: Aperture, 1995. This book features photographs of people with mental disabilities.

Arbus, Diane, Marvin Israel, and Doon Arbus. Diane Arbus.1972. Twenty-fifth-anniversary ed. New York: Aperture Foundation, 1997. The new edition of this book has three hundred new prints.

Arbus, Diane, Thomas W. Southall, Doon Arbus, and Marvin Israel. Magazine Work. London: Robert Hale, 2001. This book concentrates on the photographs by Arbus printed in magazines.

Arbus, Doon, and Diane Arbus. Diane Arbus: The Libraries. San Francisco: Fraenkel Gallery, 2004. This book includes many photographs by Arbus that have been in exhibitions.

Crookston, Peter. “Extra Ordinary.” The Guardian, October 1, 2005. Arbus wrote the author letters about her enthusiasms. In an insightful comment, Arbus said she wanted her photographs to show what was hidden in everyone.

Urbach, Henry. “Arrested Vision.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 8, no. 4 (2007): 353-354. The author compares Arbus’s work to looking out an apartment window at the lives of those in other apartments.