Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus is one of the most original and influential photographers of the twentieth century. She studied photography with Berenice Abbott, Alexey Brodovitch, and Lisette Model and had her first published photographs appear in Esquire in 1960. In 1963 and 1966 she was awarded John Simon Guggenheim Fellowships and was one of three photographers whose work was the focus of New Documents, John Szarkowski’s landmark exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 1967. Arbus’s depictions of couples, children, female impersonators, nudists, New York City pedestrians, suburban families, circus performers, and celebrities, among others, span the breadth of the postwar American social sphere and constitute a diverse and singularly compelling portrait of humanity. A year after her death, her work was selected for inclusion in the Venice Biennale, the first time any photographer had been so honored.

In the ensuing fifty years, major traveling museum retrospectives have been mounted by the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1972), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2003), the Jeu de Paume, Paris (2011) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2016), and the Art Gallery of Ontario (2020).

Books devoted to her work include: Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (1972), Magazine Work(1984), Untitled (1995), Revelations (2003), The Libraries (2004), A Chronology (2011), Silent Dialogues(2015), In the Beginning (2016), A Box of Ten Photographs (2018), and Documents (2022).

In addition to the museums mentioned above, significant collections of her work can be found in numerous institutions throughout the world. The Bibliothèque Nationale de France was an early collector, and the Centre Pompidou followed.