diane arbus's words

Her father owned a 5th Avenue department store. At the age of 14, Arbus met Allan Arbus, who she would marry in four years. They both worked in the fashion industry as photographers. Arbus's artistic career started in 1959 when she began studying photography with Lisette Model. Arbus received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1963 as well as in '66. A year later, John Szarkowski curated her first exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. On July 26th, 1971 she committed suicide. "My favourite thing" she told her students shortly before her death "is to go where I’ve never been," adding that "nothing is ever the same as they said it was".

Arbus's work smashed the boundaries of what is considered to be proper photography. In 1972, the Museum of Modern Art held a major posthumous retrospective of her photographs and she was the first American photographer to be exhibited at the Venice Biennale.

A whore I once knew showed me a photo album of Instamatic color pictures she'd taken of guys she'd picked up. I don't mean kissing ones. Just guys sitting on beds in motel rooms. I remember one of a man in a bra. He was just a man, the most ordinary, milktoast sort of man, and he had just tried on a bra. Like anybody would try on a bra, like anybody would try on what the other person had that he didn't have. It was heartbreaking. It was really a beautiful photograph.

My favourite thing is to go where I've never been.
 
A Photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.
 
I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do - that was one of my favourite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse.
 
Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks are born with their trauma. They've already passed it. They're Aristocrats.

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.

"I have never seen pictures like them before, and I am sure I will never see their equal again. They are the product of something beyond the camera, the result of a long, complex and intensely human process. No one can go into the street tomorrow and take a Diane Arbus photograph. That would be merely adjusting a lens and pressing a button. What made her pictures great was everything that happened before she pressed the button."
Douglas Davis, Newsweek, 1984

"Diane Arbus is one of our legends, her monograph a pivotal classic that changed the direction of photography in America. She captured the complexity and the art in reality. The quality that defines her work and separates it from almost all other photography is her ability to empathize on a level far beyond language."
Nan Goldin, Bookforum, 1995

I wrote Dark in July and August 1992. It took about six weeks to write. Actually that's not true, it took about 3 years to write, it was in 1989 when I first saw the work of Diane Arbus. Her images had such an impact on me that I was compelled to find out more about the woman behind the camera. I was a first year drama student at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, and even then I contemplated doing something on her work. The seed was planted then, and I knew one day it would flower."

Gerald Lepkowski talks about the writing of
"Dark ~ The Adventures of Diane Arbus"

Opportunities for sensationalism abound in a book about Arbus, who already had a history of severe depressions and a crumbling marriage by the time she began to take the controversial, technically innovative pictures of dwarfs, nudists and drag queens that won her a reputation as "a photographer of freaks." Bosworth balances the lurid details -- rumors that Arbus had sex with her subjects, that she photographed her own suicide in 1971 -- with a nuanced appraisal of an artist whose images captured the uneasy mood of the 1960s by expressing her personal obsessions.



In 1971 Diane Arbus, the most notable woman photographer since Dorothea Lange and Margaret Bourke White, committed suicide. She was 48, at the height of her success and her creative powers. The usual diagnosis is that she paid for her arresting work and the (then) unconventional subject matter of her portraits with her life; the life that prompted her to ferret out her subject matter was finally too hot for her to handle. Patricia Bosworth, in her poorly written, mostly undocumented, but nonetheless absorbing biography, follows in this tradition: moody, artistic, fey rich girl, simultaneously isolated and protected, indulged and neglected, grows up to peer at the horrific and the forbidden, and to put herself in situations of titillating danger. Her visions of the other reality and her kinky tastes while in pursuit of her images drive her to kill herself. We don't have to be told that the book is going to become a major movie.
find out why Elsa doesn't like ita major movie.

Diane Arbus books