Word: arbus
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Diane Arbus: Revelations," the retrospective of her work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is very much like any single Arbus image--powerful and weirdly but irresistibly moving. The last major Arbus exhibition was mounted by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1972, one year after she committed suicide at age 48. The current exhibition, which was co-organized by Elisabeth Sussman, a guest curator, and Sandra S. Phillips, the museum's chief curator of photography, is poised to be one of the blockbusters of the next few years. After it closes...
...accompanying book, Diane Arbus: Revelations (Random House) includes a detailed chronology of Arbus' life that was prepared with the assistance of her daughter Doon, who controls the Arbus estate and who long refused to allow writers to use Arbus pictures to accompany their work unless they submitted it first to her for approval. But Diane Arbus is no longer shocking in the way she was 30 years ago. To begin with, the world has changed. (A man with tattoos on his face? Take any bus.) More than that, we've absorbed the lessons that Arbus taught. If she still appears...
When she photographed a Jewish giant at home with his parents or a Christmas tree in Levittown in fullest bleak regalia, Arbus was situated between complicity and awe, a place where irony is beside the point and mere compassion has been left behind for something like mordant communion. It all makes for some complicated feelings. There's not a false or sentimental image anywhere in this show, yet one of the final groupings of pictures, in which retarded children face the camera to throw us back at ourselves in difficult ways--can move you to places where tears...
...think of Arbus as so quintessentially modern that it's a shock to remember that she was a child of the flapper age and the Depression. She was born Diane (she pronounced it Dee-ann) Nemerov in New York City in 1923. Her father was the director of Russek's, a Manhattan fur and fashion emporium that had been founded by her mother's family and made them rich. Arbus, her younger sister Renee and her older brother Howard--later a U.S. poet laureate--grew up on Park Avenue. She spoke once of realizing the existence of another world...
...turned out, Arbus would be crucial in the transition that documentary photography made from the social concerns of the '30s to the personal obsessions it began to take on in the 1950s. She went to private schools but never college. In 1941 she married Allan Arbus, who worked in her father's store. After the war they opened a fashion-photography partnership. In the '50s she studied with Lisette Model, a photographer who knew the power of people thrust forward heavily into the frame. In time Arbus' marriage decayed, but all the while she was creating herself...