Diane Arbus
An Intimate Retrospective
Diane Arbus was an American photographer known for her intimate black and white portraits. Born in 1923, she grew up in an affluent New York Jewish family that owned a 5th Avenue department store. Arbus wanted to explore beyond that privilege as she worked to normalize the marginalized. She forged relationships with the transgender community, carnival performers, strippers and the mentally ill. The young Arbus was taking pictures for herself in the 1940’s, but it wasn’t until 1956 when she marked a roll of film #1, that she began the work that brought her acclaim. She died in 1971 of suicide.
In 2016, The Art Gallery of Ontario acquired the second largest collection of Arbus photographs and is now set to open its exhibition Diane Arbus: Photographs, 1956-1971. “It’s wonderful for us to be able to put the early works together with the later work in a chronological hang so that visitors can really experience the evolution of her work over the key 15 years of her career,” said Sophie Hackett, AGO’s Curator of Photography. “Arbus is known as someone who photographs the marginalized,” added Hackett, “in the exhibition I’m hoping that what people will see as in fact that the range is greater than that, she’s photographing the powerful as well as those that have been overlooked by society.”
The exhibition’s collection of the early years reveal an artist fascinated by life as it unfolded on the streets of New York City. Her work throughout the 1950’s brings to light an eclectic cast of characters as seen in Many clowns in a car, NYC, 1960 and Women and a dwarf backstage at the circus, NYC, 1958. Her 35mm camera produced intimate, grainy prints. “I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them,” Arbus once said.
In 1962, Arbus switched from the 35mm camera to a 2 1/4 Rolleiflex camera with its distinctive square image. During this decade, Arbus created some of her most iconic works with her direct, sharply focused signature style such as Puerto Rican woman with a beauty mark, NYC, 1965, Teenage Couple on Hudson Street, NYC, 1963 and Three female impersonators, NYC, 1962. “The direct even confrontational gaze of the individuals in her photographs remains bracing to our eyes still today provoking recognition, empathy and unease,” said Hackett.
Her portraits were published in magazines and presented in museum exhibitions. In 1968 Arbus photographed Mrs. Martin Luther King on the front lawn of her Atlanta, Georgia home. The ethereal image of Mrs. King looking up to the sky was for Harper’s Bazaar. “Arbus was fascinated by the differences between us as human beings and was moved to describe those differences,” said Hackett. “In fifteen short years, she produced perhaps the most compelling and demanding portraits the 20th century had seen to that point.”
Diane Arbus: Photographs, 1965-1971 opens on February 22, 2020, at Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario.
