Diane Arbus

Now that I have finished reading the Diane Arbus biography, I’d like to revisit her as a topic. I have posted some initial remarks earlier.

I couldn’t be further away from her in terms of visual style, even so I admire her work and empathise a lot with some of her personality traits and her raison d’être as a photographer.

Arbus was known for her use of harsh flash light, the use of the square format and she worked mainly in black and white (although she changed her style a few times, depending on the camera she was using at the time). She was famous for being able to create stark psychological portraits of the subjects she photographed. Somehow she managed to seduce her subjects to let down their guards when she photographed them.

Her subjects were usually found on the fringes of society or dealt with the aberrations from the mainstream: giants, dwarfs, transvestites, ‘freaks’ as she called them. But she also did a lot of assignments for magazines and she photographed a great deal of (would-be) celebrities and starlets (the Paris Hiltons of the 1960s) at the time (often in quite an unflattering way).

Diane Arbus also managed to get access to the strangest situations and people. She photographed in nudist camps, at sex orgies, at mafia gatherings, bondage houses... How the hell she got access to these places and people is quite remarkable.

In short, in her work, she was on the quest for metaphorical images with documentary context and meaning (something I can definitely relate to and this will play a major role in my project over the summer in the Ukraine). And despite being at the height of recognition as an artist around 1970, she was continuously plagued by self-doubt and had her bouts with depression. She rubbed shoulders with the great and good at the time in the photographers’ and artists’ scene: she was close to Robert Frank, particularly close to Richard Avedon, Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, Lisette Model (her teacher), and last and not least had access to curator and director at the MoMa John Szarkowski. She was admired and respected by most of them.

However, she was a deeply insecure and vulnerable person with a somewhat split personality. She was ultimately on the quest for herself and her place in this world. Arbus struggled with her inner demons and she was a lonely person, too. Unfortunately she lost that struggle and committed suicide on 26 July 1971. Her photographic legacy lives on, though…