Two men dancing at a drag ball, N.Y.C. 1970. By Judith Butler, ArtForum, February, 2004 The Diane Arbus exhibition “Revelations,” currently (2004) showing at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is not difficult to attend. The crowds that circled the block to see the major Marc Chagall exhibition earlier this fall are now quite […]
It is hard now to remember what all the upset was about when they were new; hard to remember, for example, that when the Museum of Modern Art mounted an Arbus retrospective a year after her death, there were some viewers among the teeming crowds pressing into the museum to gawk at the freaks who […]
Along with Berenice Abbott and Weegee, Lisette Model became a photographer of New York. The city–the place became very important to Model–even her portraits are uniquely anchored to place. By Elsa Dorfman, Ann Thomas on Lisette Model (Published by the National Gallery of Canada to accompany an exhibition of Model’s work which travelled in the […]
“Perhaps here we have stumbled upon a partial, but nonetheless astonishing description of the creative act at the heart of serious photography: nothing less than the measuring and folding of the cloth of time itself.” By Paul Graham This month I read a review in a leading US Art Magazine of a Jeff Wall survey […]
Diane Arbus’ Noah’s Ark of Humanity – A legendary photographer’s unfinished book By Randall Decoteau This article was written in response to the exhibit Diane Arbus: Family Albums at the Portland Museum of Art. In 1968, three years before her suicide, the great American photographer Diane Arbus (1923-1971) wrote that she was compiling her photographs […]
Untitled by Diane Arbus, New York, Aperture 1995 By Elsa Dorfman Originally published in The Women’s Review of Books, January 1996 Best known for her portraits of people who live on the margins of society – giants, midgets, freaks, transvestites, nudists – Diane Arbus is an undisputed master of photography. Her work is in every […]
Then she appeared at the door, and compared with my image of her, she might almost have been her own daughter. A Visit with Diane Arbus – On a Hot Summer Day in New York, One Month Before Her Death By Allan Porter On a hot, muggy afternoon in New York, I took a […]
Seated Transvestite with Crossed Ankles, N.Y.C., 1966 Since there were few spaces for photographers to exhibit or sell their work in the late fifties, Arbus had to continually seek out magazine work. The Missing Photographs: An Examination of Diane Arbus’s Images of Transvestites and Homosexuals from 1957 to 1965 By Laureen Trainer Much […]
A family on their lawn one Sunday in Westchester, N.Y., 1968 Where Diane Arbus Went: A Comprehensive Retrospective, prompts the author to reconsider the short yet powerfully influential career of a photographer whose “fascination with eccentricity and masquerade brought her into an unforeseeable convergence with her era, and made her one of its essential voices. […]
A Diane Arbus video that interviews Jack Dracula who was photographed by Arbus in NYC during the 60’s. Jack worked at Hubert’s Museum as a sideshow attraction.