A Young Man in Curlers at Home on West 20th Street (N.Y.C. 1966) Arbus uses a strong flash to create a high-contrast photograph in “A Young Man in Curlers at Home on West 20th Street,” which is representative of the strong, conflicting ideologies of Americans in the 1960s. The man’s face is stark white compared […]
“The House Project” by Roger Ballen and Didi Bozzini with Oodee publisher is by far the best Roger Ballen Book I have seen.
The photographer once stated dryly that the centripetal composition of all of his pictures was based on the Confederate Flag.
Diane Arbus at “Love-In,” Central Park, New York 1969 @ The Estate of Garry Winogrand Arbus hunts out forms that can be judged as impure, hidden from the view of everyday onlookers. Whilst transsexuals, tattoos and prostitutes are now very much part of the “Official Institution of the Conventional Archetype of the Bizarre”, there […]
A young family in Brooklyn going for a Sunday outing. Their baby in named Dawn. Their son is retarded. NYC, 1966 The ten photographs, all of people except for the one of a Christmas tree in the corner of a home in Levittown, New York, show a range of groupings, from single figures to […]
One of Arbus’s last series of photographs was of the institutionalized mentally retarded, whom she found “the strangest combination of grownup and child” she’d ever seen. By William Todd Schultz, excerpt from An Emergency in Slow Motion: The Inner Life of Diane Arbus, 2011 Essential Mysteries One of photographer Diane Arbus’s first pictures, she […]
She was not a theorist but an artist. Her concern was not to buttress philosophical questions but to make pictures. By John Szarkowski, Director, Department of Photography, NY MoMA Diane Arbus’s pictures challenge the basic assumptions on which most documentary photography has been thought to rest, for they deal with private rather than social […]
By Robert Coles, Wellesley College, 1977 I have an intense dislike for Diane Arbus. I don’t like her photographs and I don’t like the cult that’s been made of them. Maybe it’s because I’m a psychiatrist, because some part of me feels that that’s wrong, that that isn’t the whole of the reality. Or maybe […]
“I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do, that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse.” – Diane Arbus By Gerry Badger as a collaboration with ASX, Originally Published in Phototexts, 1988 The principal issue raised by the remarkable photographs […]
“There are two ways of looking at a thing. Either you feel that a thing must be perfect before you present it to the public, or you are willing to let it go out even knowing that it is not perfect, because you are striving for something even beyond what you have achieved, but […]
This is an abridged transcript of an online chat session, hosted by V&A Photography Curator Martin Barnes, which took place on Friday 21 October 2005. 2005-10-21 13:56:23 VAModerator Welcome to the V&A’s Diane Arbus Revelations chatroom. Photography Curator Martin Barnes is here to answer as many of your questions as he can. 2005-10-21 13:57:42 MartinBarnes […]
Young Couple in Parked Open-Air Car, Ossining, New York 1932-34 By Carter Radcliff, Originally Published in Tate Magazine, Issue 5, 2003 In 1932, Walker Evans photographed a young couple in a roadster parked at the curb in a small town somewhere in America. The top is down, giving the photographer and his subjects direct views […]