Diane Arbus: Revelations
V&A Museum, London
13 October 2005 – 15 January 2006
“Nothing is ever the same as they said it was. It’s what I’ve never seen before that I recognize.” Diane Arbus
The V&A presents a major exhibition on Diane Arbus, the legendary New York photographer whose work captured 1950s and 1960s America and transformed the art of photography. Diane Arbus Revelations is the largest retrospective of her work ever assembled and is the first international Arbus exhibition for over 30 years.
The exhibition consists of nearly 200 of the artist’s most significant photographs – making it the most complete presentation of her work ever assembled. Prints are drawn from major public and private collections throughout the world and include many images that have never been exhibited publicly. Among the works on display are such iconic images as ‘A Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, N.Y. 1970’, ‘Identical twins, Roselle, N.J. 1967’, ‘Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C. 1962’ and ‘A young man in curlers at home on West 20th Street, N.Y.C. 1966’. Benefiting from new research, the exhibition also reveals the artist’s methodology and intellectual influences through an innovative presentation of contact sheets, cameras, letters, notebooks, and other writings, as well as books and ephemera from Diane Arbus’s personal library.
Mark Jones, the director of the V&A, said: “Diane Arbus changed the face of photography with her powerful and moving photographs which captured 1950s and 1960s America. She has had a profound influence on photographers ever since and on the way we look at our fellow human beings. This is a long overdue retrospective which shows her work is as compelling as ever."
Diane Arbus (1923–1971) was born in New York City and found most of her subjects there. She was a photographer primarily of people she discovered in the metropolis and its environs. Her “contemporary anthropology” - portraits of couples, children, carnival performers, nudists, middle-class families, transvestites, people on the street, zealots, eccentrics, and celebrities – stands as an allegory of postwar America and an exploration of the relationship between appearance and identity, illusion and belief, theatre and reality.
For Diane Arbus photography was a medium that tangled with the facts. Many of her subjects face the camera implicitly aware of their collaboration in the portrait-making process. In her photographs, the self-conscious encounter between photographer and subject becomes a central drama of the picture.
DIANE ARBUS: SHORT BIOGRAPHY
“That is what I love: the differentness, the uniqueness of all things and the importance of life … I see something that seems wonderful; I see the divineness in ordinary things.” — excerpt by Diane Arbus from a high school essay on Plato
Diane Arbus (born Diane Nemerov in New York City in 1923) first began taking pictures in the early 1940s. While working in partnership with her husband, Allan Arbus, as a stylist collaborating in their fashion photography business, she continued to take pictures on her own. She studied photography with Berenice Abbott in the 1940s and with Alexey Brodovitch in the mid-1950s. It was at Lisette Model’s photographic workshop circa 1956, however, where Diane Arbus found inspiration and began seriously pursuing the work for which she has come to be known.
Her first published photographs appeared in Esquire in 1960. During the next decade, she worked for Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, The Sunday Times Magazine and other magazines.
In 1962 - while searching for greater clarity in her images and for a more direct relationship with the people she was photographing - Diane Arbus began to turn away from the 35mm camera and started working with a square format (2 1/4-inch twin-lens reflex) camera. She began making portraits marked by a formal classical style that has since been recognised as a distinctive feature of her work.
She was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1963 and 1966 for her project on “American Rites, Manners, and Customs.” She augmented her images of New York and New Jersey with visits to Pennsylvania, Florida, and California, photographing contests and festivals, public and private rituals.
Notable among her late works are the images from her Untitled series, made at residences for people with mental disabilities between 1969 and 1971. These images echo much earlier works, such as Fire Eater at a carnival, Palisades Park, N.J. 1956; Child in a nightgown, Wellfleet, Mass. 1957; and Bishop by the sea, Santa Barbara, Cal. 1964. In 1970, Diane Arbus made a portfolio of original prints entitled A box of ten photographs, which was meant to be the first in a series of limited editions of her work.
Diane Arbus committed suicide in 1971. At the time of her death, Diane Arbus was already a significant influence - and something of a legend - among serious photographers, although only a relatively small number of her most important pictures were widely known. While her reputation continued to grow through the publication of several books and a few select shows, not until Diane Arbus Revelations has it been possible to view the complete range of her work. Diane Arbus had a remarkably original and consistent vision and her pictures remain as powerful and controversial today as when they were first seen.
Diane Arbus’s gift for rendering strange those things we consider most familiar continues to challenge our assumptions about the nature of everyday life and compels us to look at the world in a new way. By the same token, her ability to uncover the familiar within the exotic enlarges our understanding of ourselves. Her devotion to the principles of the art she practiced – without deference to any extraneous social, political, or even personal agenda – has produced a body of work that is often shocking in its purity, in its bold commitment to the celebration of things as they are.
After the V&A, the exhibition will travel to Fundación “la Caixa”, Barcelona (February – May 2006) and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (July – October 2006). It has already been on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany.
This exhibition has been organised by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The international tour was made possible by the Evelyn D. Haas Exhibition Fund and Charles Schwab & Co., Inc. The exhibition has been co-curated by Sandra Phillips, SFMOMA senior curator of photography and Elisabeth Sussman, guest curator. At the V&A, Martin Barnes, Curator of Photographs, organised the exhibition.
Diane Arbus Revelations
Published by Jonathan Cape (Random House), 2003, 336 pages
V&A Museum
Cromwell Rd, London SW7 2RL
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