Diane Arbus

• Born: 14 March 1923
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: 26 July 1971 (suicide)
• Best Known As: New York photographer of oddball humans

Name at birth: Diane Nemerov

Diane Arbus was a New York photographer known for her black and white portraits of eccentrics, carnival performers and, as she put it, "freaks." The daughter of well-to-do fur merchants, she married her teenage sweetheart, Allan Arbus, soon after she turned 18. Together they had a fashion photography business for more than a decade, but in 1959 they ended their partnership and marriage and Diane began studying fine art photography. In the 1960s she worked as a photojournalist, received two Guggenheim fellowships (1963 and 1966) and received critical praise for her vaguely disturbing portraits of society's fringe members. After her 1971 suicide, a national touring exhibit by the Museum of Modern Art and a book of her photographs by Aperture magazine made her one of the most famous fine art photographers in the U.S. Her most famous photos include Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C., 1962 and Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J., 1967.

An original print of Identical Twins sold for $478,400 in 2004... Her ex-husband, Allan Arbus, left the photography business in the 1960s to pursue an acting career; one of his more notable roles was as psychiatrist Sidney Freedman, a recurring character in the television series M*A*S*H (1972-1983, starring Alan Alda)... She committed suicide after a period of depression by taking barbituates and cutting her wrists... Her brother Howard Nemerov (1920-1991) was twice the Poet Laureate of the United States: from 1963-64 and again from 1988-90.

For more information on Diane Arbus, visit Britannica.com.

The American photographer Diane Nemerov Arbus (1923-1971) specialized in photographs of nontraditional subjects, including gays, the physically challenged, circus performers, and nudists.

Diane Arbus was born Diane Nemerov on March 14, 1923. The daughter of a wealthy New York businessman (the family owned Russeks department store on Fifth Avenue), Arbus led a pampered childhood. Being a member of a prominent New York family, she grew up with a strong sense of what was "acceptable" and what was "prohibited" in polite society. Her world was a protected one in which she never felt adversity, yet it seemed to her to be an unreal world. Ludicrous as it may seem, the sense of being "immune" from hardship was painful for her. An extremely shy child, Arbus was often fearful but told no one of her fantasies. Her closest relationship was with her older brother, Howard.

From the seventh through the twelfth grade Arbus attended Fieldstone School in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, a part of the Ethical Culture educational system. Here she became interested in myths, ritual, and public spectacle, ideas which would later inform her photography. At Fieldstone she also devoted much time and energy to art class - painting, sketching, and working in clay. During this period of her life Arbus and several of her friends began exploring New York on their own, getting off the subway in unfamiliar areas of Brooklyn or the Bronx, observing and following interesting or unusual passersby.

At the age of 14 Diane met Allan Arbus, a 19-year-old City College student who was employed in the art department at Russeks. It was love at first sight. Her parents disapproved, but this only served to heighten Diane's resolve to marry him as soon as she came of age. In many ways, Allan represented an escape from all that was restricting and oppressive in her family life. They were married in a rabbi's chambers on April 10, 1941, with only their immediate families present.

Early Career as Fashion Photographer

To ease financial pressures, Allan supplemented his job at Russeks by working as a salesman and also by doing some fashion photography. Arbus became his assistant. During World War II when Allan was sent to a photography school near Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, Arbus moved to nearby Red Bank and set up a darkroom in their bathroom. Allan taught her everything he was learning at the school. In May of 1944 Allan was transferred to another photography school, this time in Astoria, Queens. Then, late in 1944, he was sent to Burma. By this time Diane was pregnant with their first child, Doon, who was born April 3, 1945.

During the 1940s Arbus studied briefly under photographer Berenice Abbott. After Allan's discharge from the army, husband and wife teamed up as fashion photographers, working for Russeks and Bonwit Teller. Their first magazine assignment appeared in the May 1947 issue of Glamour and marked the beginning of a long association with Condé Nast publishing firm. Their trademark was to shoot models in action. Yet the Arbuses despised the shallowness of the fashion industry. Her real joy during this period was photographing friends and relatives; often she wore her camera around her neck at family meals.

On April 16, 1954, Arbus gave birth to her second daughter, Army. In addition to her fashion work with Allan, she photographed children - strangers in Spanish Harlem, the offspring of close friends, and, of course, Doon and Amy. Throughout the 1950s she also found herself increasingly attracted to nontraditional subjects, people on the fringes of normal society. This provided a release from the oppression she felt in the fashion world. During these years she also suffered from recurring bouts of depression.

In 1957 the couple decided to make a change. He continued to run their fashion studio, freeing her to photograph subjects of her own choice. She briefly attended Alexey Brodovitch's workshop at the New School and, on her own, made a detailed study of the history of photography. But Arbus found herself most drawn to the photographs of her contemporaries Louis Faurer and Robert Frank and, especially, to the unusual images of Lisette Model. In 1958 Arbus enrolled in a class Model was offering at the New School.

It was during this period of work with Model that Arbus decided what she really wanted to photograph was "the forbidden." She saw her camera as a sort of license that allowed her to be curious and to explore the lives of others. Gradually overcoming her shyness, she enjoyed going where she never had, entering the lives and homes of others and confronting that which had been off-limits in her own protected childhood.

Career with a "Candid Camera"

Model taught her to be specific, that close scrutiny of reality produces something fantastic. An early project Arbus undertook involved photographing what she referred to as "freaks." She responded to them with a mixture of shame and awe. She always identified with her subjects in a personal way. Model once referred to Arbus' "specific subject matter" as "freaks, homosexuals, lesbians, cripples, sick people, dying people, dead people." Instead of looking away from such people, as does most of the public, Arbus looked directly at these individuals, treating them seriously and humanely. As a result, her work was always original and unique.

When Arbus and her husband separated in 1960, her work became increasingly independent. During that period she began her series of circus images, photographing midget clowns, tattooed men, and sideshow subjects. She frequented Hubert's Freak Museum at Broadway and 42nd Street, fascinated by what she saw. She returned again and again until her subjects knew and trusted her. She also frequented the Times Square area, getting to know the bag ladies and derelicts.

Arbus posed her subjects looking directly into the camera, just as she looked directly at them. She said, "I don't like to arrange things; I arrange myself." For her, the subject was always more important than the picture. She firmly believed that there were things which nobody would see unless she photographed them. Arbus created photo essays of these subjects which she sold to magazines such as Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, and Infinity.

In the early 1960s Arbus began to photograph another group, nudists. She frequented nudist camps in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, agreeing to go naked herself in order to gain her subjects' trust. This period, 1962 to 1964, was a particularly productive one for her. Among Arbus' many accomplishments during this time was winning her first Guggenheim fellowship, which allowed her to photograph "American rites and customs, contests, festivals. … "

Three of Arbus' pictures were included in John Szarkowski's 1965 show at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), "Recent Acquisitions" - one of two female impersonators back stage and two from her series on nudists. Viewers were shocked and often repelled by these frank images. A few years later her work was included, along with that of Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, in Szarkowski's "New Documents" exhibition at the MOMA. The show, which opened March 6, 1967, marked the pinnacle of Arbus' career and included some 30 examples of her work. One critic called her "the wizard of odds." Another asserted that she catered "to the peeping Tom in all of us."

From 1966 on Arbus struggled with bouts of hepatitis which often left her weak and depressed. Then, in 1969, Allan Arbus formally divorced her, marrying Mariclare Costello; soon after, they moved to California. During this difficult period Arbus photographed many of the leading figures of the 1960s: F. Lee Bailey, Jacqueline Susann, Coretta Scott King. She also did some lecturing at Cooper Union, Parsons, and Rhode Island School of Design in addition to giving a master class at Westbeth, the artists' community in which she lived.

Arbus committed suicide in her New York apartment on July 26, 1971. Perhaps the words of her longtime friend, photographer Richard Avedon, provide the most fitting epithet: "Nothing about her life, her photographs, or her death was accidental or ordinary." Her unique vision, her personal style, and the range of her subject matter provided a seminal influence in 20th-century photography.

Further Reading

The standard work on Arbus' photography is the Aperture monograph Diane Arbus (1972). Patricia Bosworth's Diane Arbus, a Biography (1984) provides a good overview of the photographer's life. In addition, Magazine Work (1984), edited by Doon Arbus and Marvin Israel, includes both Arbus' own words and essays by those closest to her. Arbus is also included in Anne Tucker's The Woman's Eye (1973) and is the subject of numerous magazine and newspaper critiques.

Arbus, Diane (1923-71), American photographer, born in New York. Her father, a wealthy department-store owner, provided her and her brother, the poet Howard Nemerov, with a comfortable if insular upbringing. She married young and, following the Second World War, with her husband Allan Arbus ran a successful photography business, specializing in portraiture and fashion. By the late 1950s she was working independently and had become known for her magazine work. She studied with Lisette Model for a time, but also rode with Weegee through the city's seamy nights. Recognized by John Szarkowski as a unique talent, Arbus was included in a show of new acquisitions at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965 and appeared at MoMA again in 1967 in the influential New Documents exhibition. Her notoriety, as a photographer of odd, vulnerable, and marginal people, grew. Arbus herself was increasingly troubled, and committed suicide in 1971. The following year she was included in the Venice Biennale, the first photographer so honoured.

In many respects Arbus embodies the major elements of much that was happening in photography in the mid-20th century. She was a photojournalist; but, introspective to a fault, was also photographing herself while ostensibly photographing others. Her most bizarre subjects at first sight often provoke a sequential reaction: gawking, followed by an attempt to come to terms with what one has just done. Perhaps more than any other photographer, Arbus has prompted us to deal with our natural inclination to want to stare—without giving it up.

Some who knew Arbus in New York as her celebrity grew saw her compulsive aggressiveness as essentially that of a paparazzo. But Walker Evans, more kindly, said of her: ‘Her distinction is in her eye, which is often an eye for the grotesque and gamey; and eye cultivated just for this to show you fear in a handful of dust.’

— Tim Troy

Bibliography

• Arbus, D., and Marvin, I. (eds.), Diane Arbus, Magazine Work (1984).
• Bosworth, P., Diane Arbus: A Biography (1984).
• Hulick, D. H. (ed.), ‘Diane Arbus’, History of Photography, 19 (1995)

Quotes:

"Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that's what people observe. You see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw. It's just extraordinary that we should have been given these peculiarities. Something is ironic in the world and it has to do with the fact that what you intend never comes out like you intend it."

"It gets to seem as if way back in the Garden of Eden after the Fall, Adam and Eve had begged the Lord to forgive them and He, in his boundless exasperation, had said, All right, then. Stay. Stay in the Garden. Get civilized. Procreate. Muck it up. And they did."

"A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know."

"If I were just curious, it would be very hard to say to someone, I want to come to your house and have you talk to me and tell me the story of your life. I mean people are going to say, You're crazy. Plus they're going to keep mighty guarded. But the camera is a kind of license. A lot of people, they want to be paid that much attention and that's a reasonable kind of attention to be paid."

"My favorite thing is to go where I have never gone."

Diane Arbus
Screen test of Diane Arbus, photo by Allan Arbus c. 1949
Birth name	Diane Nemerov
Born	March 14, 1923(1923.-03-14) New York City, New York, United States
Died	July 26, 1971 (aged 48) Greenwich Village, New York, United States
Nationality	American
Field	Photography
Works	Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park (1962) Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967 (1967)

Diane Arbus (14 March 1923 – 26 July 1971) was one of the most original and influential American photographers of the 20th century. In 2003, she and her work were the subject of a major exhibition: Diane Arbus Revelations that was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and traveled to other locations including The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in 2005. In 2006 her life story was the subject of a motion picture starring Nicole Kidman as Diane Arbus.

Contents 1 Personal life 2 Career highlights 3 Famous photographs 4 Notes 5 References 5.1 Biographies 5.2 Photographs 6 External links

Personal life

Diane Arbus (née Nemerov) was born in New York City into a wealthy Jewish family, ^[1] the younger sister of Howard Nemerov, who served as United States Poet Laureate on two separate occasions. She attended the Fieldston School for Ethical Culture.

Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967, on the cover of Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph.

She married her childhood sweetheart Allan Arbus in 1941. During the 1940s, she and her husband began a commercial photography business. Their daughter, Doon, was born in 1945 and their second daughter, Amy was born in 1954. In the 1940s, Diane Arbus took classes with Berenice Abbott. In 1955, she studied with Alexey Brodovitch and, from 1956-58, with Lisette Model. Diane and Allan Arbus separated in 1959, and they were divorced in 1969.^[2][3]

In 1963 and 1966 Diane Arbus was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships for her project American Rites, Manners and Customs. During the 1960s, Diane Arbus taught photography at the Parsons School of Design, and The Cooper Union in New York City and the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island.^[2]

On July 26, 1971, while living at Westbeth Artists Community, while suffering from depression, Diane Arbus took her own life by ingesting pills and slashing herself with a razor. She was 48 years old.^[4]

Career highlights

Arbus' Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, New York City (1962)

• Edward Steichen's noted photo exhibit, The Family of Man, included a photograph credited to Diane Arbus and her husband.^[5]

• One of Arbus' studies included such people as Gloria Vanderbilt's then-infant son, future CNN anchorman Anderson Cooper, for Harper's Bazaar.^[6]

• In 2006, the film Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus was released, starring Nicole Kidman as Arbus. It used Patricia Bosworth's book Diane Arbus: A Biography as a source.

Famous photographs

• Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park,^[7] New York City (1962) — Colin Wood, son of tennis player Sidney Wood, with the left strap of his jumper awkwardly hanging off his shoulder, tensely holds his long, thin arms by his side. Clenching a toy grenade in his right hand and holding his left hand in a claw-like gesture, his facial expression is maniacal. Arbus captured this photograph by having the boy stand while moving around him, claiming she was trying to find the right angle. The boy became impatient and told her to "Take the picture already!" This photo was also used, without permission, on the cover of punk band SNFU's first studio album, And No One Else Wanted to Play.
• Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967 — Young twin sisters are seen standing side by side in corduroy dresses. One slightly smiles and the other slightly frowns. This photo is echoed in Stanley Kubrick's film The Shining, which features twins in an identical pose.
• Jewish Giant at Home with His Parents in The Bronx, NY^[8] (1970) — Eddie Carmel, the "Jewish Giant", stands in his family's apartment with his much shorter mother and father.
• Masked Woman in a Wheelchair PA, 1970

Notes

1. ^ Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus - Movie - Review - New York Times
2. ^ ^{a b} "Diane Arbus Revelations". Metropolitan Museum of Art. http://www.metmuseum.org/special/Arbus/arbus_more.htm#2. Retrieved 2009-07-11. 
3. ^ Bissell, Gerhard. "GerbisNet - Diane Arbus". http://gerbis.net/publications/arbus.html. Retrieved 2009-07-11. 
4. ^ Diane Arbus at the Jewish Virtual Library
5. ^ Marshall, Peter. "Diane Arbus: Key Facts". About.com. http://photography.about.com/od/acphotographers/a/arbuskey.htm. Retrieved 2006-12-22. 
6. ^ Bosworth, Patricia, Diane Arbus: A Biography, NYC: W.W. Norton, 1984
7. ^ University of Chicago
8. ^ University of Southern California

References

Biographies

• Bosworth, Patricia. 2005. Diane Arbus: A Biography. W.W. Norton, 2005. ISBN 0393326616, 978-0393326611
• Diane Arbus: Revelations. Random House, 2003. ISBN 0375506209, 978-0375506208

Photographs

• Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph, Aperture, 2005. ISBN 0893816949, 978-0893816940
• Diane Arbus: Untitled, Aperture, 2005. ISBN 089381623X, 978-0893816230
• Diane Arbus: Magazine Work, Aperture, 2005. ISBN 0893812331, 978-0893812331

External links

• Washington Post (May 12, 2005): "Double Exposure: A Moment With Diane Arbus Created A Lasting Impression", by David Segal
• Washington Post/Camera Works (undated; circa 2003): "Diane Arbus: Revealed And Rediscovered", by Frank Van Riper
• The Social Affairs Unit (Dec. 16, 2005): "Art as Freak Show: Diane Arbus, Revelations at the V&A", by Christie Davies - Review of retrospective at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, England
• Short critical biography, by Gerhard Bissell
• Hillary Mac Austin, Diane Arbus, Jewish Women Encyclopedia

Persondata
NAME	Arbus, Diane
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Nemerov, Diane
SHORT DESCRIPTION	American photographer
DATE OF BIRTH	14 March 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH	New York City
DATE OF DEATH	26 July 1971
PLACE OF DEATH	Greenwich Village, New York City

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