Diane Arbus: American Portraits
After a successful run as a fashion photographer, shooting for the likes of Vogue and Harper’s BAZAAR, Diane Arbus turned her lens to the rest of the world. Her photos captured those on the periphery, and her portraits were soon renowned for their simple, yet compelling subject matter. It wasn’t about the photograph, it was about the people. “For me, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. And more complicated,” she once wrote.
Her subjects included transgenders, nudists, others somehow impaired, young couples and those whose faces told a story. The woman with eyeliner who looks slightly to the left, her hair framing her face and covering her ears. Her expression is solemn. We don’t know her name, she is just Woman with eyeliner N.Y.C. Or the young boy who makes a funny face while holding a toy grenade. He is just known as Child with toy hand grenade, in New York City, 1962. These were the people on the periphery, the marginalised, the oddities, yet for Arbus, represented a view of the world that was otherwise ignored, who were somehow anonymous but in desperate need of attention.
Arbus grew up in New York City’s affluent Upper East Side, and her father owned a popular Fifth Avenue department store. Yet while the family was wealthy, even during the Great Depression, Arbus felt displaced, and not at ease with her gilded lifestyle. At 18 she married actor and photographer Allan Arbus and together launched her foray into fashion photography. When the couple divorced in 1959, she began expending her energy on photographing those who society had caused to become the marginalised.
Her first major exhibition New Documents which was held at MoMA, was on show along with Gary Winogrand and Lee Friedlander. Her focus was controversial. Her creative license was questioned but at the same time praised. She was voyeuristic yet sympathetic, but regardless, as a form of photographic justice, Arbus brought into the spotlight those who were scrutinised.
It was only after her death in 1971 that her work garnered a greater appreciation. She was the first American photographer, albeit posthumously, to have her work exhibited at the Venice Biennale. After this was the Arbus retrospective at MoMA, where an estimated crowd of 250,000 passed through to gaze at Arbus’s collection. Voyeuristic, sympathetic, acceptable or unacceptable subject matter, the photography of Arbus laid an important
Diane Arbus: American Portraits is the latest Arbus exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia, which is home to 36 rare, vintage works which were some of the last taken before Arbus’s death. Her pieces are shown alongside the works of others who also dared to shift focus away from the beautiful, rich and famous, and capture the faces of everyday Americans, creating a vision that moving, and a feeling that is conflicting.
Diane Arbus: American Portraits is on now at the the National Gallery of Australia until Sunday 30 October 2016.
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