Diane Arbus (1923–1971; born in New York) revolutionized the terms
of the art she practiced. In addition to Diane Arbus: Revelations,
four other volumes of her work have been published posthumously and
have remained continuously in print: Diane Arbus: An Aperture
Monograph (1972), Untitled: Diane Arbus (1995), Diane Arbus: A
Chronology (2011), and Diane Arbus: A box of 10 photographs (2018,
with Smithsonian American Art Museum). Doon Arbus is the eldest
daughter of Diane and Allan Arbus; since her mother’s death she has
managed the Estate of Diane Arbus.
Marvin Israel was an American artist, photographer, painter,
teacher, and art director from New York, known for modern and
surreal interiors, and abstract imagery.
Diane Arbus was not a theorist but an artist. Her concern was not
to buttress philosophical positions but to make pictures. She loved
photography for the miracles it performs every day by accident, and
respected it for the precise intentional tool that it could be,
given talent, intelligence, dedication and discipline. Her pictures
are concerned with private rather than social realities, with
psychological rather than visual coherence, with the prototypical
and mythic rather than the topical and temporal. Her real subject
is no less than the unique interior lives of those she
photographed. –John Szarkowski, 1972, Director, Department of
Photography, The Museum of Modern Art
Those portraits of sideshow performers and weeping children, her
matter-of-fact nudists and naked transvestites, her pictures of
"them," her pictures of "us"—something of consequence is at stake
here, and it's not just art. Arbus worked at the point where the
voyeuristic and the sacramental converge. She lies in wait for your
first misstep in her direction. Then she dares you to stare at
something—a little boy with a toy hand grenade, a dominatrix
embracing her client—until you admit your own complicity with
whatever it is in there that frightens you. At that point, all the
picture's traps unfold, and it confers its rough grace. –Richard
Lacayo, Time
Confronting a major photograph by Arbus, you lose your ability to
know—or distinctly to think or feel, and certainly to
judge—anything. She turned picture-making inside out. She didn’t
gaze at her subjects; she induced them to gaze at her. Selected for
their powers of strangeness and confidence, they burst through the
camera lens with a presence so intense that whatever attitude she
or you or anyone might take toward them disintegrates…You may feel,
crazily, that you have never really seen a photograph before.
–Peter Schjeldahl The New Yorker
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