“She reminds us that we’re each unique ... that we’re vulnerable, proud, silly and strange,” says the curator of Diane Arbus: Photographs, 1956-1971, opening Thursday at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
Diane Arbus had a way of stopping time. And the oeuvre of the American photographer, who died by suicide in 1971 at the age of 48, has a way of stopping people in their tracks.
“She really does make you hang on for a second,” said Sophie Hackett, curator of photography at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) and curator of the exhibition Diane Arbus: Photographs, 1956-1971, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts from Sept. 15 to Jan. 29.
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“Of course, a still photograph is still, but there’s something about the way she charges that stillness,” Hackett said. “I think it has to do with the frontality with which she approached many of her subjects.”
Famous for her striking portraits of people from all walks of life with faces you can’t forget, staring into the camera with a swirl of mixed emotions, Arbus evoked both the dignity and indignity of life in modern society.