Diane Arbus, Photographer

Portrait of Diane, taken circa 1949.

Diane Arbus was born in March of 1919 into a talented family. Her parents owned a large department store in NYC, her sister was an artist and designer, and her brother was the United States Poet Laureate. Diane, however, got her parents’ disapproval at the age of 14, when she professed her love for the man she would marry 4 years later.

Her husband, Allan, worked as a fashion photographer for the Arbus’ department store, and Diane joined in. She also took photography classes and created photos on her own. At first she took photographs of children and her family members, but today Diane Arbus is remembered for different subjects.

At first she explored different neighborhoods, waiting for the moment a passerby noticed her before snapping a photo. In this way she caught images of interracial couples, young boys smoking cigarettes, and even friends walking through Central Park with hot dogs. Later she photographed what were considered to be fringe groups: circus performers, nudists, cross-dressers, the disabled, and others.

Masked woman in a wheelchair, 1970.

Some who viewed her photos were made uncomfortable by them, and some considered themselves to be insulted by them. But Diane was known to grow her relationships with her subjects so that she was trusted, and her goal was never to exploit them. After Diane's death, some people speculated that she documented fringe groups because she herself felt like an outsider.

If you want to learn more about this controversial photographer who is still considered important today, here are some online reading suggestions as well as some books you might want to check out later.

Online Reading to Browse from Home

"A Fresh Look at Diane Arbus" by Tessa DeCarlo @ Smithsonian Magazine
"Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer" by Anthony Lane @ The New Yorker
"How Diane Arbus became 'Arbus'" by Arthur Lubow @ The New York Times

Books in Physical Formats

Diane Arbus: Revelations by Diane Arbus
Her subject matter and photographic approach have established the greatness of Diane Arbus. She had a gift for rendering strange the things we consider familiar, and uncovering the familiar in the exotic. Her treatment of her subjects and her faith in the power of photographs has produced a body of work that is shocking in its purity. This book reproduces 200 full-page duotones of photographs spanning her career, many never before seen. It also includes an essay by Sandra S. Phillips, senior curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and a discussion of Arbus’s printing techniques by Neil Selkirk, the only person now authorized to print her photographs. A 104-page Chronology by Elisabeth Sussman, guest curator of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art show, and Doon Arbus, the artist’s eldest daughter, illustrated by more than 300 additional images and composed of previously unpublished excerpts from the artist’s letters, notebooks, and other writings, makes this a kind of autobiography. 

Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph: Fortieth-Anniversary Edition edited by Doon Arbus
When Diane Arbus died in 1971, she was already an influence—even a legend—for serious photographers, although only a small number of her pictures were known at the time. The publication of Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph in 1972—along with the posthumous retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art—offered the public its first encounter with the breadth and power of her achievements. The response was unprecedented. The monograph, composed of 80 photographs, was edited and designed by the painter Marvin Israel, Diane Arbus' friend and colleague, and by her daughter Doon Arbus. Universally acknowledged as a photobook classic, Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph is a timeless masterpiece.

An Emergency in Slow Motion: The Inner Life of Diane Arbus by William Todd Schultz
Diane Arbus was one of the most brilliant photographers in the history of American art. Her black and white portraits seemed to reveal the psychological truths of their subjects. But after she committed suicide in 1971, the presumed chaos and darkness of her inner life became inextricable from her work. William Todd Schultz's An Emergency in Slow Motion reveals the creative and personal struggles of Diane Arbus. Schultz veers from traditional biography to interpret Arbus's life through the prism of four mysteries: her outcast affinity, her sexuality, the secrets she kept and shared, and her suicide. He seeks not to diagnose Arbus, but to discern some of the motives behind her public works and acts. His analysis is informed by the recent release of some of Arbus's writing and work by her estate, and interviews with her psychotherapist.