Diane Arbus – Flirt, Flash & Mirror (2013)

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 […]

Diane Arbus: “Essential Mysteries (Excerpt)” (2011)

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 […]

Diane Arbus MoMA Exhibition Wall Label Text (1972)

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 […]

Notes from the Margin of Spoiled Identity – The Art of Diane Arbus (1988)

“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 […]

Diane Arbus (1991)

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 […]

Diane Arbus’ Noah’s Ark of Humanity” (2004)

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 (1996)

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 […]

A Visit with Diane Arbus, One Month Before Her Death

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 […]

Where Diane Arbus Went (2005)

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. […]