Diane Arbus

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New York 1923 – 1971

Diane Arbus is considered a master of 20th century photography.

She was born into a very affluent Jewish family of Polish descent. Born Diane Nemerov, when 18 she married photographer Allan Arbus who was working for the family’s fur fashion company. She began her career working with major fashion magazines such as Vogue, Glamour and Harper’s Bazaar.

In 1957 she separated from her husband. She began a personal artistic journey for which she received a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation.

The Photography of Diane Arbus changed radically with more contemporary connotations.

She started performing strong contrasts and lighting also obtained with flash. We must consider that the use of flash light was not very popular at the time, especially among artistic photographers.

Slowly, she abandoned studio photography and immersed himself inside New York’s popular life and places. The city offered unusual inspiration, full of bizarre characters, outcasts and freaks who become Arbus’s obsession and with whom the viewer is forced to make an intimate connection.

During her long training as a fashion photographer she grew as a professionist in formal rigor and technical perfection. Later, however, Arbus would willingly renounce it.

In the late 1950s, she began her personal quest and reacted to the cosmetic falsification of bourgeois reality.

Stepping out of the studio, she dived to capture images of a reality she had never photographed, environments and atmospheres she was afraid of.
The times were right. With the exponents of the beat generation rejecting the models of American bourgeois life and the pop aesthetic capturing instead its essence of constructed perfection ispired by advertising for the consumer society. Instead, Arbus chose to take sides more openly and actively seeking a private engagement with her subject. Her camera being free of veils and makeup, far from fashion, without judgment and against all moralism.
This will earn her the constant scorn of well-wishers, but also the continued support and encouragement of photographer and intellectual friends.

Some technical notes

Diane Arbus’s peculiar subjects are a constant in her artistic maturity.
Fascinated by the 1932 film “Freaks,” she went to meet the unfortunate victims of congenital deformities and eccentric individuals, whom she portrayed preferably in their homes and bedrooms. In these cases he makes extensive use of the “medium format,” which, beginning in 1962, totally revolutionized his photography.
The technique is not an end in itself but serves to accommodate his new expressive needs. Indeed, the subjects he chose and the honesty in portraying them demanded clarity of image and definition of great detail. The absence of judgment and narrative needs that expire in drama require a square, symmetrical framing and subjects placed frontally in the center of the photograph.
Diane Arbus admired and studied the work of August Sander, with his classical compositions in which the people portrayed looked at the viewer, standing in the center of a sober background. But she was also attentive to the teaching of Lisette Model, for whom, however, photography was meant to be a tool of inquiry. Instead, Arbus opts rather for an exchange of emotions between photographer and photographed. Photography is not research, it is not technical virtuosity: it is a connection.

So, while the images taken in her youth are muffled and harmonious, with time Diane Arbus adopts the strong contrasts of flash outdoors, both at night and during the day.

Until her 60s she used a 35 mm Nikon and then switched to a medium format 6×6, first a bioptic Rolleiflex, then a Mamiya C33, and from 70 also a Pentax 6×7.

In her works we always find the direct relationship of a revealing gaze, which she probably achieves (as well as with her, by many witnessed, innate ability to put people at ease) also thanks to the non-aggressive charge of the type of photographic equipment she uses: her cameras with waist-level viewfinders are not obtrusive and aggressive, and the photographer, head bowed, does not awe the sitter, looking directly at him like the scientist peering through a microscope. This type of machine is a psychological boundary.

After her suicide due to depression (often overrated when judging her photographic work), she was the first among American photographers to be hosted by the Venice Biennale in 1972; and MOMA hosted a major retrospective in the same year.

Diane Arbus’ entire archive is preserved at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

Find here below some books and prints.