Diane Arbus - one of America’s best Known and Most Inspirational Photographer
Hello, photography fans! Welcome back to About Photography blog. Today I am going to check out a photographer who is one of America’s best-known and also most controversial photographers, also known as a “photographer of freaks.” Let´s check out Diane Arbus.
Diane was born as Diane Nemerov in 1923 in New York to Jewish parents who were immigrants from Soviet Russia. They were actually pretty rich, as they owned Russeks, which was a department store on Fifth Avenue. Thanks to that, she was not affected by the Great Depression. Being a kid in a wealthy family also however meant she was mostly raised by maids. It was perhaps the environment she lived in that she kind of separated herself from the family. Even though her parents didn’t directly raise her, they had an indirect influence on her life. After her father retired he became a painter. Her sister became a designer and sculptor and her brother a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. Diane herself started painting but quit just after she finished high school.
Perhaps missing the family bonds, she married very young at the age of 18 to Allan Arbus. They both worked in a commercial photography business for a while from 1946 to 1956. Unfortunately the marriage didn’t work out and they got divorced in 1969. Her husband left and became an actor. You might actually remember him from the tv series M*A*S*H where he played Dr. Sidney Freedman. I actually recognise him and I am not even From the US so I guess you might as well.
But it is not her personal life that I want to talk about. So, let’s check out her photography career. Arbus received her first camera (which was a Graflex camera) just after she married at the age of 18. Her husband was actually a photographer for the U.S. Army Signal Corps in the second world war. She started taking photography classes with Berenice Abbot a photographer best known for her portraits.
In 1946 they started together Diane & Allan Arbus which was a commercial photography business where she would have a role of art director. She was responsible for concepts and models which wasn’t really a dream come true for her as she saw her position as very unfulfilling. Even though Diane and Allan both didn’t particularly like fashion photography the business produced photographs for Russek’s advertisements and also for fashion magazines such as Vogue, Glamour or Seventeen. In the second half of 50s Diane began more and more focusing mainly on her own work. But other than that, we can say they were pretty successful. A photograph that they made for the Vogue magazine a father and son reading a newspaper was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition “The Family of Man” in 1955.
One of the earliest is this photograph 42nd Street movie theater audience, N.Y.C. 1958 which captures a number of people sitting underneath a flared projector light. Now, what we can take from this is she was probably quite shy at the beginning shooting from places where she could not be seen avoiding the human interaction. At first Arbus admired the grainy look the camera and film were able to produce. Her camera of choice was first Nikon with a 35mm lens that she used for photographing New York City. Sometimes around 1962 she switched to twin-lens reflex Rolleiflex camera. The medium format camera came to be one of Arbus' compositional signatures.
She explained this transition saying "In the beginning of photographing I used to make very grainy things. I’d be fascinated by what the grain did because it would make a kind of tapestry of all these little dots...But when I’d been working for a while with all these dots, I suddenly wanted terribly to get through there. I wanted to see the real differences between things...I began to get terribly hyped on clarity."
She first started what we can now call her own version of street photography. One of the important mentors in her career was Lisette Model, an Austrian-born photographer mostly known for her street photography. She later said Arbus came to her telling her she cannot photograph. “I want to photograph what is evil” she said. “She was determined to reveal what others had been taught to turn their backs on.” noted Model.
The scheme typical for her photography is a frontal portrait in square format. She was one of the pioneers of daylight flash use which she used to isolate her subjects. What she first liked about it was how it alters light and reveals thing you don’t normally see.
The reason for that was as she said she wanted to have stillness in her photograph and that is why she always posed her subjects either on the street or in their homes. She made the subjects look directly to the camera to “freeze” the picture. However as we can see in many of her picture the effect was quite opposite. Many of her pictures look spontaneous. Other than that, she also said she liked to keep the subject as it was and rather rearrange herself.
The Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C (1962)
The Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C (1962) is probably one of the most famous ones. The image is unusual and I would say little disturbing. I mean, seeing a kid who is kind of tense and angry in a pose with his teeth clenched and holding a hand grenade in one hand with the second hand in a shape of claw-like gesture is bit unusual I would say. Standing alone makes him isolated from others in the park. It is considered to be one of the most important and influential images of the 20th-century's art and post-modernist art theory. When we look at the contact sheet we can see she took plenty of “normal” photographs of the kid in the park smiling and playing around. However, when it came to picking the final image she chose the most expressive one. The boy in the photograph is Colin Wood and he later said:
“She catches me in a moment of exasperation. It's true, I was exasperated. My parents had divorced and there was a general feeling of loneliness, a sense of being abandoned. I was just exploding. She saw that and it's like...commiseration. She captured the loneliness of everyone. It's all people who want to connect but don't know how to connect. And I think that's how she felt about herself. She felt damaged and she hoped that by wallowing in that feeling, through photography, she could transcend herself.”
Now, what’s interesting is that more than shooting random subjects she met on the street she was often trying to develop personal relationship with the subjects and photograph them over time. She started to photograph much differently than was common until then. The intention behind it was to be original and unique.
'A very young baby, N.Y.C. 1968' is a photograph of Anderson Cooper CNN correspondent and son of Gloria Vanderbilt. It was one of the photograph Arbus took for Harper's Bazaar in 1968. She knew the parents so she asked about coming over and spending some time photography the newly born baby. She kept coming for about 3 weeks and apparently took a lot of pictures. She finally picked this one. Cooper himself doesn’t find it disturbing. The photographs from Arbus are in his room hanging up with Diane's note.
Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, NY, 1970
The”Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, NY, 1970," is a photograph of Eddie Carmel standing in his parents' living room. It is an archetype of Arbus’s photographs. As a teen, even though Carmel was normal height during his childhood, Carmel started to grow uncontrollably as a result of acromegaly. He grew to be 8'9 OR 270 Centimeters. The photo looks kind of like a preparation for the family portrait. For me the vignetting intensifies his size and the voyeuristic feel from the photograph just like sneaking in someone’s home and watching them through the keyhole. Unfortunately he died at the age of 36; just 2 years after Arbus took this photograph. Arbus believed she got what she called every mother’s nightmare. She said
“"You know how every mother has nightmares when she's pregnant that her baby will be born a monster? I think I got that in the mother's face as she glares up at Eddie, thinking, Oh my God, no."
One of my favourite shots is the Girl in her circus costume, Md. 1970. Somehow I just can’t avoid the comparison of the Wonderwoman from the Marvel universe and for me this photos is a representation of the 70s and how would they probably portray the subject at that time.
The subjects she photographed were often people with troubled lives, people from the underground or just people who were not accepted or let’s say respected by the rest of society. She often sympathized with them probably because it was often something she wasn’t able to experience in her life. We can say the subjects had completely different backgrounds than she had. She would shoot strippers, carnival performers, transvestites, members of LGBT Community, nudists, or people with mental disabilities. She said the subjects in her pictures were more important for her than the picture itself. Photographer Edmund Shea said about her: “Some people like to think of her as cynical. That’s a total misconception, she was very emotionally open. She was very intense and direct, and people related to that.” Perhaps the most valuable thing for her was not the photograph but the event of visiting someone and the process of making the photographs. I wouldn’t say she was redefining beauty but perhaps showing the space between how the people wanted to be seen and how they were seen.
If you're interested in learning more, check out this book "Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer": This biography delves into the complex and enigmatic life of Diane Arbus, exploring her personal struggles and artistic achievements. It provides a comprehensive account of her life, influences, and photographic legacy.
When we want to learn about how influential she was I think it is best to use the words of art critic Robert Hughes: "Arbus's work has had such an influence on other photographers that it is already hard to remember how original it was."
She was twice awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship; first in 1963 for a project called "American Rites, Manners, and Customs" and then again in 1966. During the 60s Arbus worked for magazines but also took all kinds of commissions such as documentary photographs or family portrait. She had to do it since it was pretty difficult at that time to make living just by selling fine art photography. Even though she was a recognized artist, her prints usually sold for 100 USD or less. As she became even more recognized as an artist, she took less magazine assignments and she also taught photography in New York City and Rhode Island. She was the first photographer to be featured in Artforum, which is an international magazine focusing on contemporary art. She had he her first big exhibition at the Museum of Modern art in New Documents in 1967 which was a documentary photography exhibition curated by John Szarkowski. Thirty-two of her photographs were chosen for the exhibition that represented a new direction in photography: ordinary subjects with a snapshot-like look. The exhibition presented works of three photograhers: Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander. None of them was actually well known at that time.
Unfortunately, just like her mother, Arbus suffered from depression as well as hepatitis. She experienced mood swings and her then ex-husband even talked about “violent changes of mood”. It escalated in 1971 when Arbus committed suicide. She was 48 years old.
Today, her works are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.
That is all for this short introduction of Diane Arbus. Let me know what is your favourite picture of hers. Also, feel free to suggest other interesting photographers you like in the comments.
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If you want to find more information here are some sources and interesting pages:
Wikipedia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisette_Model
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diane_Arbus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_with_Toy_Hand_Grenade_in_Central_Park
"The Cost of Diane Arbus's Life on the Edge"
DIANE ARBUS AND THE POWER OF CRUEL ART
"Incest, suicide – and the real reason we should remember Diane Arbus" (loading film)
An Emergency in Slow Motion: The Inner Life of Diane Arbus by William Todd Schultz
diane arbus: in the beginning at The Met Breuer
Diane Arbus' Photos and the Stories Behind them
