Diane Arbus

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Diane Arbus , née Nemerov (born March 14, 1923 in New York City , † July 26, 1971 there ) was an American photographer and photojournalist of Russian-Jewish descent.

Graffiti of the famous twins by Diane Arbus in Carme, Valencia
Inspiration after Diane Arbus' child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, New York City in 1962
Diane Arbus tram stop - Porte des Poissonniers in Paris

Arbus is best known for her partly sensitive, partly relentless portraits of eccentrics and marginal figures in society, in which she works out the memorable, different and peculiar. Extensive topic complexes deal, among other things. with circus performers , nudists , transvestites , twins , prostitutes or malformed and mentally disabled people. In addition to questioning the limits of normality and the aesthetics of society, she expanded artistic photography to include sharply accentuated psychological aspects.

Diane Arbus was the first American photographer whose work was exhibited at the Venice Biennale (1972). An overview of her works, conceived after her death in 1972, presented the core of her work to an audience of millions as a traveling exhibition from 1972–79 and made her a cult figure . The monograph Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph , first published in parallel in 1972, is one of the best-selling books in the history of photography and is still being reissued to the present day.

Life

childhood

Diane Nemerov - her maiden name - grew up in New York City on Park Avenue and Central Park . Her family owned the Russeks fur and fashion department store on Fifth Avenue . Nemerov's parents left the upbringing of their three children to the employees. Each child had their own nanny. Diane Nemerov had a close relationship with her three years older brother Howard Nemerov , who later achieved fame as a writer. For her sister Renée, who was five years younger than her and who was successful as a sculptor and interior designer, she was a substitute mother.

Nemerov attended the Ethical Culture School from 1930 . Her artistic talent, which was recognized there, was promoted by her father David Nemerov since 1935 with additional drawing lessons from the illustrator von Russeks, Dorothy Thompson. Thompson had studied painting with George Grosz . Grosz remained Arbus' favorite painter throughout her life. In 1937 she met the employee Allan Arbus in the art department of Russeks and wanted to marry him immediately. To prevent this, her parents sent her to Cummington Art School in the summer of 1938. Here she met her second great love, Alex Eliot , the great-grandson of Harvard President Charles W. Eliot .

The 1940s and 1950s

In 1941 Nemerov married Allan Arbus against the wishes of his parents. The couple had two daughters, Doon (* 1945) and Amy (* 1954), with whom Diane Arbus spent a lot of time. In addition to two jobs as a salesman, Allan Arbus also tried his hand at photography. However, he actually wanted to be an actor. Because of the responsibility as a family man, he gave up this dream. In 1943, Allan Arbus completed his training as a photographer with the army's telecommunications service.

In 1946, Diane Arbus started her own business as a fashion photographer with her husband. In that year she studied for a short time with Berenice Abbott , who had become famous for her New York pictures and who now explored the phenomena of physics with the camera. The couple received their first orders from David Nemerov, who financed some of their equipment. In 1947 they presented to Condé Nast . You were hired by the company, which includes fashion magazines like Glamor and Vogue, to do a series about sweaters.

After the war, fashion photography, with its color nuances and lighting, was very much oriented towards painting. This expectation of their work and the usual substance abuse in the scene always kept Diane and Allan Arbus at a distance from their industry. They preferred to work in a completely unconventional way with inexperienced models. Every now and then they also tried to break the conventions of a usual fashion shot.

In 1951 the Arbus family spent a year in Europe. This year Diane Arbus learned photographic vision through a variety of sensual impressions. In addition to their travels to Spain and Italy , they worked on an order for Vogue in Paris .

In the mid-1950s, Diane Arbus met Richard Avedon through her friend, the painter Marvin Israel . They remained very close friends and admirers of each other throughout their lives. Another friend Arbus met during this time was the photographer Robert Frank , a fan of snapshot photography .

Shortly before the birth of their daughter Amy, the "Arbs", as they were then known, hired the then eighteen-year-old Japanese photographer Tod Yamashiro as an assistant. He stayed until the end of the studio in 1969. The studio's most successful years began in 1955. You made cover recordings for Glamor and Seventeen , belonged to the editorial staff of Vogue and also received advertising contracts from advertising companies such as Young & Rubicam .

Even in her childhood, Diane Arbus repeatedly suffered from severe depression . As dissatisfaction with their work and marriage grew, so did the depression. After a mental breakdown in 1957, they both decided to split up professionally. Diane wanted to focus more on her own work, and Allan continued to run the studio but took acting classes on the side. The professional separation was followed by a private one a year later. They continued to be friends with each other. It wasn't until 1969, when Allan wanted to remarry, that they divorced.

In 1957, Diane Arbus attended a workshop with Alexei Brodowitsch , the art director of Harper's Bazaar . The following year, she completed several workshops with Lisette Model at the New School. Lisette Model, Austrian portrait photographer, became famous overnight with her portraits in the early forties. She also sought the extreme in her motifs. As a result of these lessons, Arbus left her previous range of topics and discovered locations in New York such as Hubert's Museum , a sideshow wine cellar, and the club 82 transvestite club . Here she found her first models, which she in turn introduced to other eccentrics . She once said: “Lisette freed me from my bourgeois-puritanical prejudices. Photographs that deserve admiration have the power to startle. "

In the late 1950s, Diane Arbus presented her freelance work to a number of magazines. She also started her career with the reputation that she had already earned as a fashion photographer.

The 1960s - magazine work

Between 1960 and 1971, Arbus earned her living mainly as a freelance photo reporter for various magazines. Some of her best work came about on her commercial commissions, partly because some of her most interesting motifs were only accessible to her with a press card. Many magazines showed a willingness to experiment, especially in the 1960s. There was no hesitation in questioning and redefining the content, character and breadth of the respective magazine. This opened a new market for photographers like Diane Arbus. Arbus had regular collaborations with Esquire and Harper's Bazaar . Other magazines that published photos of her included New York , Show , Glamor , Essence , Harper's Magazine , The New York Times , Holiday , Sports Illustrated , Herald Tribune (New York) , The New York Times Book Review and The Saturday Evening Post .

After her first two assignments for Esquire (1960: A Vertical Journey ) and Harper's Bazaar (1961: Completing the Circle ), more than 250 recordings appeared in over 70 magazine articles in the eleven years of her activity. Diane Arbus often worked on the lyrics. Mainly they were photos of the rich and beautiful, but their photos of eccentrics also caught on in the editorial offices of magazines, whereby even the photos of the rich and beautiful often looked eccentric.

Over the years, Arbus' consistent style increasingly led her editors to target her for specific assignments. On the other hand, other projects were not even approached to them because they were not worthy of their talent (e.g. photographs of politicians) or it was assumed that they would not match their inclinations. This restricted the range of their subjects.

In 1963 and 1966, her freelance work was supported by Guggenheim grants . In 1967 the results of these years were presented to the public together with works by Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand in the exhibition New Documents at the Museum of Modern Art . Despite the buzz caused by the exhibition, Diane Arbus' financial situation did not improve that much. However, the art director of the British magazine Sunday Times Magazine , Michael Rand , became aware of them. From 1968 Arbus worked regularly with Rand and Deputy Editor Peter Crookston on photo reports for the magazine. In 1969 Crookston left the Times and became editor of Nova Magazine . Both magazines jointly financed a stay in England for Arbus in 1970. At a time when other magazines were losing interest in Diane Arbus's work due to staff or profile changes, she had found enthusiastic patrons and sponsors in the Sunday Times Magazine and Nova . Arbus tried to compensate for the decline in photo orders with other projects. In 1969/70, for example, she was commissioned to prepare an exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art on the subject of reportage photography and also accepted teaching assignments at the Cooper Union , Parsons School of Design in New York and the Rhode Island School of Design .

That year Arbus moved into an apartment in the Westbeth Artists Community , an artists' colony in the West Village . In 1970 she started her series about disabled people. In the same year she received the Robert Lewitt Prize from the American Society of Magazine Photographers . Since a hepatitis disease in 1966 and 1968, their increased depression . Despite two years of therapy, the attacks were repeated at ever shorter intervals. In 1971 she committed suicide by taking barbiturates and cutting her wrists with a razor. Previously, she had written the words "Last Supper" in her diary and placed her diary on the stairs that led to the bathroom. Her friend Marvin Israel found her body in the bathtub two days later.

In 1972 Diane Arbus was the first American photographer ever to be exhibited at the Venice Biennale . In the same year, the Museum of Modern Art held a Diane Arbus retrospective with great success. In 1977 her works were shown at Documenta 6 in Kassel .

The pictures

Arbus' theme was the surreal, the sick and the repulsive in daily life. She photographed outsiders such as transvestites, dwarfs, prostitutes, nudists, and the mentally and physically disabled. Ordinary, average people also found their way in front of their cameras and were photographed in poses of unsettling strangeness. In doing so, Arbus never merely exhibited their subjects, but gave them space and time to meet and position themselves in front of the camera. Your pictures are therefore not snapshots, the people portrayed were always aware of being photographed. Nevertheless, her photos do not seem posed: the photographer did not force her subjects to pose, but left them to their own devices in front of the camera. This is how pictures of an absurd parallel world were created: Unusual people, often ugly, grotesque, everyday, but of great strangeness. Susan Sontag remarked in her essay On Photography : “The people who are located in Arbus' world always reveal themselves. There is no 'decisive moment' here. [...] Instead of persuading them to adopt a 'natural' or typical posture, she encouraged her models to appear awkward - that is, to pose. When they stand or sit there stiffly, they already look like images of themselves. ”Susan Sontag suspects that“ Arbus' interest in strange guys expresses her desire to do violence to her own innocence [and] her feeling of being privileged, to undermine [..].

Diane Arbus had been using a Rolleiflex since 1962 , with a negative format of 60 × 60 mm instead of 24 × 36 mm. This square format seemed to correspond better to her direct, centered way of composing, and the larger negative also revealed more detail. Diane Arbus oriented herself to the way she worked in the studio: the choice of camera, the lighting of the object and the carefully thought-out composition contradict the image of the snapshot taken at the right moment. Her pictures with the unusual settings of light and shadow retain a certain snapshot aesthetic despite the staged scene and are thus in contrast to Stieglitz's philosophy of the perfect print.

Diane Arbus, who initially attracted attention as a fashion and portrait photographer, turned to socially critical photography under the impression of the work of August Sander , who had his greatest successes with typological portraits especially before and after the First World War. Her photo series of fringe groups in American society - she portrayed the poor, the homeless, drug addicts and people of color - were expressive, realistic portraits that hit the critical spirit of the 1960s exactly.

Movies

  • 1972: Going Where I've Never Been: The Photography of Diane Arbus , 30-minute television documentary by John Musilli about the photographer.
  • 2005: Fell - A Love Story - In the 2005 Steven Shainberg film , which is also titled An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus , Diane Arbus is portrayed by Nicole Kidman .

Solo exhibitions (selection)

  • 1972 Diane Arbus portfolio: 10 photos. Venice Biennale.
  • 1974 "Hommage à Diane Arbus" by Jean-Marc Bustamante, Arles' Théâtre Antique, Rencontres d'Arles festival, France.
  • 1973–79 Diane Arbus: Retrospective. Seibu Museum, Tokyo; Hayward Gallery, London; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, England; Scottish Arts Council, Edinburgh, Scotland; Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, Netherlands; Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus and Kunstbau, Munich, Germany; Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal, Germany; Frankfurter Kunstverein.
  • 1980 Diane Arbus: Vintage Unpublished Photographs. Robert Miller Gallery, New York.
  • 1984–1987 Diane Arbus: Magazine Work 1960–1971. Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, Kansas; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis; University of Kentucky Art Museum, Lexington; University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach; Neuberger Museum, State University of New York at Purchase; Wellesley College Museum, Massachusetts; and Philadelphia Museum of Art.
  • 1986 Seattle Art Museum.
  • 1991 Diane Arbus: Photographs. Edwynn Houk Gallery, Chicago.
  • 1991 Diane Arbus. Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation, Toronto.
  • 1992 Diane Arbus: the Untitled Series, 1970-1971. Jan Kesner Gallery, Los Angeles.
  • 1995 The Movies: Photographs from 1956 to 1958. Robert Miller Gallery, New York.
  • 1997 Diane Arbus: Women. Photology Gallery, London.
  • 2004-2005 Diane Arbus: Family Albums. Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, Massachusetts; Gray Art Gallery, New York; Portland Museum of Art, Maine; Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, Kansas; and Portland Art Museum, Oregon.
  • 2005 Diane Arbus: Other Faces Other Rooms. Robert Miller Gallery, New York.
  • 2007 Something Was There: Early Work by Diane Arbus. Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.
  • 2008–2009 Diane Arbus, a Printed Retrospective, 1960–1971. Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; and Center Régional de la Photographie Nord Pas-de-Calais, Douchy-les-Mines, France.
  • 2009 Diane Arbus. Timothy Taylor Gallery, London.
  • 2010 Diane Arbus: Christ in a Lobby and Other Unknown or Almost Known Works. Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.
  • October 18, 2011 - February 5, 2012 Diane Arbus. Jeu de Paume, Paris.

literature

  • Diane Arbus journal work . Two thousand and one, Frankfurt am Main 1990
  • .diane arbus - A monograph . Two thousand and one, Frankfurt am Main 1990
  • Diane Arbus: Revelations . Schirmer / Mosel, Munich 2003, ISBN 3829600895 .
  • Arbus, Friedlander, Winogrand - New Documents 1967 - The legendary exhibition . Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Schirmer Mosel, Munich 2017, ISBN 978-3-8296-0790-2 .
  • Carol Armstrong: Biology, Destiny, Photography: Difference According to Diane Arbus . October, Vol. 66, (Autumn, 1993), pp. 28-54, published by: The MIT Press
  • Catalog for documenta 6: Volume 1: Painting, sculpture / environment, performance; Volume 2: photography, film, video; Volume 3: Hand drawings, utopian design, books; Kassel 1977 ISBN 3-920453-00-X .
  • Gerhard Bissell , Arbus, Diane , in: Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon , Suppl. I, Saur, Munich 2005, p. 413.
  • Patricia Bosworth : Diane Arbus . Knopf, New York 1984, expanded 2005
  • Patricia Bosworth: Diane Arbus - A Biography . Schirmer / Mosel, Munich 1984, ISBN 3-8881-4150-8
  • Patricia Bosworth: Black & White. The life of Diane Arbus . DuMont, Cologne 2006, ISBN 3-8321-7993-3
  • Honnef, Klaus: 150 years of photography (extended special edition of Kunstforum International: 150 years of photography III / photography at documenta 6 , volume 22); Mainz, Frankfurt am Main (two thousand and one) 1977.
  • Reinhold Misselbeck : Photography of the 20th century Museum Ludwig. Cologne 2001, ISBN 3-8228-5513-8
  • Claudia Gabriele Philipp [= Gabriele Betancourt Nuñez]: Eye looks. Pictures by Diane Arbus . In: Photo history. Contributions to the history and aesthetics of photography, 5th year, issue 18, Frankfurt / Main 1985, pp. 29–52.
  • Susan Sontag : About Photography . Original edition 1980.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bissell, Gerhard. "Arbus, Diane" , in General Artists' Lexicon , 2006, and "Diane Arbus" (compressed English version).
  2. ↑ Felix Denk: In the darkroom of identity. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung No. 186 from 13./14. August 2007, p. 14.
  3. ↑ Susan Sontag: About Photography . New York 1977; German translation in Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 18th edition 2008, ISBN 978-3-596-23022-8 , p. 41.
  4. ↑ Susan Sontag: About Photography . New York 1977; German translation in Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 18th edition 2008, ISBN 978-3-596-23022-8 , p. 47.
  5. ↑ Harenberg's personal dictionary 20th century, data and services . In: Harenberg (Ed.): Lexicon . 1st edition. Harenberg Lexikon-Verlag, Dortmund 1992, ISBN 3-611-00228-3 , p. 48 .
  6. ↑ Going Where I've Never Been: The Photography of Diane Arbus in the Internet Movie Database . Accessed June 6, 2009.
  7. ↑ www.cinefacts.de
personal data
SURNAME Arbus, Diane
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Nemerov, Diane (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American photographer, photojournalist
BIRTH DATE March 14, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH July 26, 1971
PLACE OF DEATH New York City