Diane Arbus American, 1923-1971

Diane Arbus (1923–1971) was one of the most original and influential photographers of the twentieth century, radically expanding the possibilities of photographic portraiture. Her subjects, performers and children, couples and families, nudists, celebrities and people encountered on the street, are typically confronted at close range and face-on. The resulting portraits are at once intimate and unsettling, psychologically charged yet deliberately unresolved. “For me the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture,” she said, “and more complicated.”

Born Diane Nemerov into a prominent Manhattan family that owned Russek’s department store, she married Allan Arbus in 1941. Together they established a successful fashion photography studio, working for Glamour, Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar until the mid-1950s. She eventually left the commercial studio behind and turned decisively toward her own work, studying with Lisette Model, whose uncompromising approach to the subject proved liberating. She had also been influenced by Berenice Abbott and Alexey Brodovitch. Her first published photographs appeared in Esquire in 1960.

Working initially with a 35mm camera and, from 1962, with a square-format Rolleiflex and flash, Arbus photographed throughout New York and beyond: at Coney Island, Times Square and Hubert’s Museum; in nudist camps and residences for people with intellectual disabilities; and in the apartments of strangers who allowed her into their lives. The flash and square frame became central to her visual language, isolating her subjects from their surroundings and creating an unusual sense of directness and psychological proximity. She received Guggenheim Fellowships in 1963 and 1966. In 1967, John Szarkowski included her alongside Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander in New Documents at The Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition, which presented thirty of her portraits, helped define a new direction in American photography. Arbus also taught at Parsons and the Rhode Island School of Design.

In late 1969, Arbus began the portfolio she called A box of ten photographs: ten prints made from negatives dating from 1962 to 1970, housed in a transparent plastic case designed by Marvin Israel to function simultaneously as container and frame. Each photograph was accompanied by a sheet of vellum bearing Arbus’s handwritten inscription, evoking the intimacy and structure of a family album. She planned an edition of fifty and had completed eight sets and sold four by the time of her death. In May 1971, Artforum placed one of the portfolio’s photographs on its cover and published five additional images inside, making Arbus the first photographer to receive such treatment from the magazine. Its editor, Philip Leider, who had been skeptical about photography’s claims within the contemporary art world, wrote that after Arbus it was no longer possible to deny photography its status as art.

Arbus died in New York in 1971. The following year, she became the first American photographer to be presented at the Venice Biennale, while The Museum of Modern Art mounted a retrospective that travelled throughout the United States and Canada through 1975. The Aperture monograph published in conjunction with the exhibition has remained continuously in print, becoming one of the defining books in the history of photography.

Diane Arbus Revelations, organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2003, subsequently travelled throughout Europe and the United States through 2006. In 2016, diane arbus: in the beginning opened at The Met Breuer, drawing from the Museum’s Arbus archive and focusing on the first seven years of her mature work.

Bruce Silverstein Gallery has presented Arbus’s work in In Sequence (2025), Summer Glow (2024), REWIND (2021) and We Are the Subject (2018).