Diane Arbus

Tattooed Man at a Carnival

1970

Diane Arbus might’ve been born into New York City’s high society, which was protected from the horrors of the Great Depression, but she preferred to live life on the fringe of it. There she met the subjects of her now-iconic portrait photography — “eccentrics” such as circus performers, people with developmental disabilities and addicts.

Arbus didn’t start out photographing these people, however. She and her husband, Allan, whom she wed when she was just 18, developed a shared interest in photography after he served as a photographer during World War II. When he returned, the couple shot fashion spreads for Arbus’s family’s department store, eventually having their work published in glossy magazines.

Having studied under photographers Berenice Abbott, Alexey Brodovitch and Lisette Model, Arbus then pursued her interest in documentary work in the 1950s, taking to the streets of New York to photograph strangers. By 1962, she was shooting from the waist with a medium-format camera. She didn’t want the camera to block her connection to her subjects, which were now the people marginalized by society rather than fashion models. “For me the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. And more complicated,” Arbus explained.

Before her death by suicide in 1971, when she was just 48 years old, Arbus had achieved acclaim for her works such as Child With Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C. (1962) and Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J. (1967). She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1963 and 1966 and had her work shown in the monumental 1967 group exhibition “New Documents” at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Posthumously, her fame only broadened. MoMA put on a solo show for the artist in 1972, and, in the same year, Aperture published her first monograph.

Today, Arbus’s photographs are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, among many other institutions.

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