Diane Arbus at “Love-In,” Central Park, New York 1969 @ The Estate of Garry Winogrand Arbus hunts out forms that can be judged as impure, hidden from the view of everyday onlookers. Whilst transsexuals, tattoos and prostitutes are now very much part of the “Official Institution of the Conventional Archetype of the Bizarre”, there […]
One of Arbus’s last series of photographs was of the institutionalized mentally retarded, whom she found “the strangest combination of grownup and child” she’d ever seen. By William Todd Schultz, excerpt from An Emergency in Slow Motion: The Inner Life of Diane Arbus, 2011 Essential Mysteries One of photographer Diane Arbus’s first pictures, she […]
Are these “interrogations” real or is this just a graphic experiment meant to help us imagine the way that power is wielded behind closed doors? By Paul Loomis, August, 2012 Whether or Not the Guns are Loaded Interrogations is a collection of photographs taken in Russia and Ukraine over six years of travel by Donald […]
Janice witnessed the murder of her friend, Kim, whose husband stabbed her to death at the bus stop. Oakland, Calif., 1988. “In my experience, women who’ve been abused by their husbands, if they can get away from him, get into a shelter, and start going to support groups, they heal.” Interview with Photographer Donna […]
“Strangers and Friends” By Anne Wilkes Tucker, foreword to Rough Beauty Small towns are typically closed communities, outwardly friendly, but suspicious of anyone who is not a resident. Carrying a camera escalates those suspicions.i Paparazzi journalism and “candid camera” TV have also sensitized people to how easily a photographer can denigrate and caricature his subjects. […]
By Baptiste Lignel for ASX Upon walking into the office of the Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris, one faces a very large digital print, literally nailed to the wall. A large brown metal oval shape seems to have landed over the ruins of a city. The contrast is striking between the two halves of the […]
“Most people thought that I was glorifying that behavior,” says the 25-year-old. “But I also saw them as horror stories.” By Christopher Bollen Dash Snow (1981-2009) has been taking pictures since he was 11. But it was after a two-year stint in juvenile detention, at age 16, that he turned to the Polaroid camera […]
Two men dancing at a drag ball, N.Y.C. 1970. By Judith Butler, ArtForum, February, 2004 The Diane Arbus exhibition “Revelations,” currently (2004) showing at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is not difficult to attend. The crowds that circled the block to see the major Marc Chagall exhibition earlier this fall are now quite […]
Diane Arbus’ Noah’s Ark of Humanity – A legendary photographer’s unfinished book By Randall Decoteau This article was written in response to the exhibit Diane Arbus: Family Albums at the Portland Museum of Art. In 1968, three years before her suicide, the great American photographer Diane Arbus (1923-1971) wrote that she was compiling her photographs […]
Seated Transvestite with Crossed Ankles, N.Y.C., 1966 Since there were few spaces for photographers to exhibit or sell their work in the late fifties, Arbus had to continually seek out magazine work. The Missing Photographs: An Examination of Diane Arbus’s Images of Transvestites and Homosexuals from 1957 to 1965 By Laureen Trainer Much […]
A family on their lawn one Sunday in Westchester, N.Y., 1968 Where Diane Arbus Went: A Comprehensive Retrospective, prompts the author to reconsider the short yet powerfully influential career of a photographer whose “fascination with eccentricity and masquerade brought her into an unforeseeable convergence with her era, and made her one of its essential voices. […]