For almost four decades the complex, profound vision of Diane Arbus (1923-1971) has had an enormous influence on photography and a broad one beyond it, and the general fascination with her work has been accompanied by an uncommon interest in her self. Her suicide has been one, but just one, reason for the latter, yet for the most part, the events of her life were not extraordinary.
Arbus’s wealthy grandparents were the founders of Russek’s, a Fifth Avenue department store. Growing up well-protected in the 1930s, Arbus had only a vague sense of the effects of the Depression, and in her generation, her family became greatly cultivated (her brother was the poet Howard Nemerov). She married Allan Arbus at 18 and learned her craft with him as they prospered as commercial photographers and raised two daughters, but by the mid-1950s she felt trapped in fashion and advertising. Leaving their business, she dedicated herself to her personal work, and by the decade’s end .site and her husband separated, though they remained married until 1969, and were close until the end of her life. Her essential interests were clear after 1956, and for the next six years she photographed assiduously with a 35mm camera, in locations that included Coney Island, carnivals, Hubert’s Museum and Flea Circus of 42nd Street, the dressing rooms of female impersonators, and the streets, cinemas, parks and buses of Manhattan.
Around 1962, after Arbus studied with Lisette Model, her work changed dramatically. Adopting a 2 1/4-inch camera, she began to make the square portraits, that would occupy her almost exclusively in her prime decade. Her subjects would come to include the members, of many kinds of subculture–among them nudists and transvestites-and also the deformed and the brain damaged. She described her investigations as adventures that tested her courage, and as an emancipation from her childhood’s constraining comfort. At the same time, she worked as she wandered freely in New York City, where ordinary people gave her some of her greatest pictures. Proposing projects to the editors of magazines that included Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire and London’s Sunday Times Magazine, she was able to publish many of the photographs (sometimes accompanied by her own writing) that eventually appeared in museums. In her late years she suffered from intermittent illness and harsh depression, but her work was prominent in John Szarkowski’s celebrated “New Documents” at the Museum of Modest Art (1967)- Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander were her co-exhibitors. Her renown grew steadily after that, a large, posthumous retrospective of her work appearing at the Modern in 1972.
Many aspects of Arbus’s life and art have helped myth to form around her. These include not only her death by her own hand, the immediate cause of which has never been clear, but also her descent into the worlds of the stigmatized and into financial duress, which grew severe after she was without her husband, and as Russek’s expired. There are also the exoticism of certain of her subjects and her erotic adventurousness, which, though the license of the 1960s must have encouraged it, seems to have been exceptional. Beyond all this there is the paradoxical character of her work itself–which is visually clear yet always mysterious–and also her reflections on photography and life, which were aphoristic, evocative and often rather oracular. “A photograph is a secret about a secret, “she wrote; “the more it tells you the less you know.”