Diane Arbus Art
Diane Arbus might’ve been born into New York City’s high society, which was protected from the horrors of the Great Depression, but she preferred to live life on the fringe of it. There she met the subjects of her now-iconic portrait photography — “eccentrics” such as circus performers, people with developmental disabilities and addicts.
Arbus didn’t start out photographing these people, however. She and her husband, Allan, whom she wed when she was just 18, developed a shared interest in photography after he served as a photographer during World War II. When he returned, the couple shot fashion spreads for Arbus’s family’s department store, eventually having their work published in glossy magazines.
Having studied under photographers Berenice Abbott, Alexey Brodovitch and Lisette Model, Arbus then pursued her interest in documentary work in the 1950s, taking to the streets of New York to photograph strangers. By 1962, she was shooting from the waist with a medium-format camera. She didn’t want the camera to block her connection to her subjects, which were now the people marginalized by society rather than fashion models. “For me the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. And more complicated,” Arbus explained.
Before her death by suicide in 1971, when she was just 48 years old, Arbus had achieved acclaim for her works such as Child With Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C. (1962) and Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J. (1967). She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1963 and 1966 and had her work shown in the monumental 1967 group exhibition “New Documents” at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Posthumously, her fame only broadened. MoMA put on a solo show for the artist in 1972, and, in the same year, Aperture published her first monograph.
Today, Arbus’s photographs are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, among many other institutions.
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1960s American Modern Diane Arbus Art
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1970s Contemporary Diane Arbus Art
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1960s Contemporary Diane Arbus Art
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1970s Contemporary Diane Arbus Art
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1960s Contemporary Diane Arbus Art
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1960s Contemporary Diane Arbus Art
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1970s Other Art Style Diane Arbus Art
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1960s Contemporary Diane Arbus Art
Photographic Film, Photographic Paper, Silver Gelatin
1950s Contemporary Diane Arbus Art
Silver Gelatin, Photographic Film, Photographic Paper
1990s Contemporary Diane Arbus Art
Archival Ink, Archival Paper, Silver Gelatin
21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Diane Arbus Art
Photographic Film, Photographic Paper, Silver Gelatin
1950s American Modern Diane Arbus Art
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21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Diane Arbus Art
Photographic Film, Photographic Paper, Silver Gelatin
1980s American Modern Diane Arbus Art
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1950s American Modern Diane Arbus Art
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1990s American Modern Diane Arbus Art
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1980s American Modern Diane Arbus Art
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1970s Contemporary Diane Arbus Art
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1960s American Modern Diane Arbus Art
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Mid-20th Century American Modern Diane Arbus Art
Black and White, Silver Gelatin
1950s American Modern Diane Arbus Art
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1950s American Modern Diane Arbus Art
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1960s Contemporary Diane Arbus Art
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1970s American Modern Diane Arbus Art
Photographic Paper
1960s Modern Diane Arbus Art
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1970s Modern Diane Arbus Art
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1960s Modern Diane Arbus Art
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1950s Photorealist Diane Arbus Art
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1960s American Realist Diane Arbus Art
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1960s American Realist Diane Arbus Art
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