Diane Arbus: Monograph - Hardcover

Diane Arbus

4.04

18,149 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0912334401 ISBN 13: 9780912334400

Publisher: Aperture, 2004

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When Diane Arbus died in 1971 at the age of forty-eight, she was already a significant influence--even something of a legend--among serious photographers, although only a relatively small number of her most important pictures were widely known at the time. The publication of Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph in 1972--along with the posthumous retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art--offered the general public its first encounter with the breadth and power of her achievements. The response was unprecedented.

The monograph of eighty photographs was edited and designed by the painter Marvin Israel, Diane Arbus's friend and colleague, and by her daughter Doon Arbus. Their goal in making the book was to remain as faithful as possible to the standards by which Diane Arbus judged her own work and to the ways in which she hoped it would be seen. Universally acknowledged a classic, Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph is a timeless masterpiece with editions in five languages and remains the foundation of her international reputation.

This anniversary edition celebrates one of the most important photographic books in history on the work of a single artist. Every image in this edition has been printed from new three-hundred-line-screen duotone film, bringing to the reproductions a clarity and brilliance unattainable until now. A quarter of a century has done nothing to diminish the riveting impact of these pictures or the controversy they inspire. Arbus's photographs penetrate the psyche with all the force of a personal encounter and, in doing so, transform the way we see the world and the people in it.

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Review:

Everything that needs to be said has already been said about this book, this record, this heartache, this brave account, this body of evidence. I didn't choose to write about this book because I feel that I can say anything more eloquent than what has already been said... Arbus is able to tell us how much we want and how much we will have and will not have, she manage it in the pages of one monograph.--Laurel Nakadate "The Photobook Review "

Everything that needs to be said has already been said about this book, this record, this heartache, this brave account, this body of evidence Arbus is able to tell us how much we want and how much we will have and will not have, she manage it in the pages of one monograph. Laurel Nakadate, "The Photobook Review"

An unflinching poetry inhabits the pages of the recently published "Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph: Fortieth-Anniversary Edition," a reissue of the volume that accompanied her posthumous 1972 MoMA retrospective. "Art Critical"

What strikes me as I leaf through this book is Arbus s convincing sensibility of the world, and how thoroughly her subjects inhabit it. "Art Critical"

There is nothing clinical or exploitative about her motivations and she talks about being more interested in her interactions than in the final images that resulted from them. "Hyperallergic"

Photographs are souvenirs, a stand-in for what we experienced and wish to remember, and Arbus images are amazing relics. "Hyperallergic" "

Diane Arbus was not a theorist but an artist. Her concern was not to buttress philosophical positions but to make pictures. She loved photography for the miracles it performs every day by accident, and respected it for the precise intentional tool that it could be, given talent, intelligence, dedication and discipline. Her pictures are concerned with private rather than social realities, with psychological rather than visual coherence, with the prototypical and mythic rather than the topical and temporal. Her real subject is no less than the unique interior lives of those she photographed. John Szarkowski, 1972, Director, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art

Those portraits of sideshow performers and weeping children, her matter-of-fact nudists and naked transvestites, her pictures of "them," her pictures of "us" something of consequence is at stake here, and it's not just art. Arbus worked at the point where the voyeuristic and the sacramental converge. She lies in wait for your first misstep in her direction. Then she dares you to stare at something a little boy with a toy hand grenade, a dominatrix embracing her client until you admit your own complicity with whatever it is in there that frightens you. At that point, all the picture's traps unfold, and it confers its rough grace. Richard Lacayo, "Time"

Confronting a major photograph by Arbus, you lose your ability to know or distinctly to think or feel, and certainly to judge anything. She turned picture-making inside out. She didn t gaze at her subjects; she induced them to gaze at her. Selected for their powers of strangeness and confidence, they burst through the camera lens with a presence so intense that whatever attitude she or you or anyone might take toward them disintegrates You may feel, crazily, that you have never really seen a photograph before. Peter Schjeldahl "The New Yorker" "

Diane Arbus was not a theorist but an artist. Her concern was not to buttress philosophical positions but to make pictures. She loved photography for the miracles it performs every day by accident, and respected it for the precise intentional tool that it could be, given talent, intelligence, dedication and discipline. Her pictures are concerned with private rather than social realities, with psychological rather than visual coherence, with the prototypical and mythic rather than the topical and temporal. Her real subject is no less than the unique interior lives of those she photographed. John Szarkowski, 1972, Director, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art
Those portraits of sideshow performers and weeping children, her matter-of-fact nudists and naked transvestites, her pictures of "them," her pictures of "us" something of consequence is at stake here, and it's not just art. Arbus worked at the point where the voyeuristic and the sacramental converge. She lies in wait for your first misstep in her direction. Then she dares you to stare at something a little boy with a toy hand grenade, a dominatrix embracing her client until you admit your own complicity with whatever it is in there that frightens you. At that point, all the picture's traps unfold, and it confers its rough grace. Richard Lacayo, Time
Confronting a major photograph by Arbus, you lose your ability to know or distinctly to think or feel, and certainly to judge anything. She turned picture-making inside out. She didn t gaze at her subjects; she induced them to gaze at her. Selected for their powers of strangeness and confidence, they burst through the camera lens with a presence so intense that whatever attitude she or you or anyone might take toward them disintegrates You may feel, crazily, that you have never really seen a photograph before. Peter Schjeldahl The New Yorker"

About the Author:

Diane Arbus--born Diane Nemerov in New York City in 1923--married Allan Arbus at the age of eighteen. She started taking pictures in the early 1940's and studied photography with Berenice Abbott in the late 1940's and with Alexey Brodovitch in the mid 1950's. It was Lisette Model's photographic workshops, however, that inspired her, around 1957, to begin seriously pursuing the work for which she has come to be known.

Her first published photographs appeared in Esquire in 1960. During the next decade, working for Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, and other major magazines, she published more than a hundred pictures, including portraits and photographic essays, many of which originated as personal projects, occasionally accompanied by her own writing. Diane Arbus: Magazine Work (Aperture, 1984) documents this aspect of her career and its relationship to her best-known imagery.

In 1963 and 1966 she was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships for her project on "American Rites, Manners, and Customs." She traveled across the country, photographing the people, places, and events she described as "the considerable ceremonies of our present These are our symptoms and our monuments," she wrote. "I want simply to save them, for what is ceremonious and curious and commonplace will be legendary."

A selected group of these photographs attracted a great deal of critical and popular attention when they were featured, along wit the work of two other photographers, in the Museum of Modern Art's 1967 exhibition "New Documents." The boldness of her subject matter and photographic approach were recognized as revolutionary.

In the late 1960's, Arbus taught photography at Parsons School of Design, the Rhode Island School of Design, and Cooper Union, and continued to make photographs. Notable among her late works is a series of photographs she took at residences for the mentally retarded. Untitled (Aperture, 1995) is a collection of fifty-one of these photographs. "The extraordinary power of Untitled confirms our earliest impression of Arbus's work," wrote Hilton Als in the New Yorker. "It is as iconographic as it gets in any medium. These pictures are purely ecstatic."

In 1970, Arbus made a portfolio of ten prints, which was intended to be the first in a series of limited editions of her work. She committed suicide in July of 1971. In the years following her death and the Museum of Modern Art's posthumous retrospective--which was seen by more than a quarter of a million people before it began its three-year tour of the United States and Canada--exhibitions devoted exclusively to her work have been mounted throughout Western Europe, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. To this day critics continue to debate the meaning of her photographs and the intentions behind them. Their indelible imprint on our visual experience has long been established beyond dispute.

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