Diane Arbus Documents - Hardcover

Arbus, Diane

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1644230658 ISBN 13: 9781644230657

Publisher: David Zwirner Books, 2022

Synopsis

Through an assemblage of articles, criticism, and essays, Diane Arbus Documents charts the reception of the artist’s work and offers comprehensive insight into the critical conversations, as well as misconceptions, around the highly influential photographer.

About this title

About the Author

Diane Arbus (1923–1971) 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, New York, 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.

Max Rosenberg is an art historian and associate director of research and exhibitions at David Zwirner. He has worked with the Estate of Diane Arbus since 2018. In that year, he helped organize Diane Arbus: Untitled, the gallery's inaugural exhibition of Arbus's work. He has received grants and awards from the Dedalus Foundation, the Fulbright Program, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the Getty Research Institute, among other institutions. His writings have appeared in various publications, including The Getty Research Journal, Texte zur Kunst, and Art in America.

From the Back Cover

Known for her evocative portraits, Diane Arbus is a pivotal figure in American postwar photography. Undeniably striking, Arbus’s black-and-white photographs capture a unique gaze. Criticized as well as lauded for her photographs of people deemed “outsiders,” Arbus continues to attract a diversity of opinions surrounding her subjects and practice. Critics and writers have described her work as “sinister” and “appalling” as well as “revelatory,” “sincere,” and “compassionate.” In the absence of Arbus’s own v

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Hilton Als, The New Yorker, 1995
“The harsh light Arbus leveled at her subjects—‘A Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, N.Y. 1970,’ ‘Loser at a Diaper Derby, N.J. 1967’—was an indication not of a merciless vision but of her desire to enhance her subjects’ presence, which she considered ‘terrific.’ Like [Andy] Warhol, Arbus used the dumbest language possible to describe her work. As though she were a child always on the verge of rebuilding the universe through found objects—or found images—no language but the most rudimentarily joyful could describe the moment when she happened upon the signposts leading toward her self-expression.”

Cindy Nemser, The Feminist Art Journal, 1973
“She makes us squirm, twist, avert our eyes, sneak a look back, giggle, and ultimately convince ourselves that our state is infinitely superior to the one that confronts us in the black and white two-dimensional image before us.”

Susan Sontag, The New York Review of Books, 1973
“Arbus’s work shows people who are pathetic, pitiable, as well as horrible, repulsive, but it does not arouse any compassionate feelings. Nevertheless, despite this evident coolness of tone, the photographs have been scoring moral points all along with critics. For what might be judged as their dissociated and naïve point of view, the photographs have been praised for their candor and for an unsentimental empathy with their subjects. What is actually their aggressiveness toward the public has been turned into a moral accomplishment: that the photographs don’t allow the viewer any distance from the subject.”

Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, 2005
“Sontag’s notorious attack on Arbus, in an essay from 1973 that became the linchpin of her book ‘On Photography’ (1977), passed one test of great criticism. It asked the right question—about photography’s claim to be a full-fledged and legitimate art—at the right time, when Arbus’s work had advanced that claim with unprecedented force. Otherwise, the essay is an exercise in aesthetic insensibility, eschewing description of the art for aspersions, often pithy, on the artist’s ethics. ‘Arbus’s interest in freaks expresses a desire to violate her own innocence,’ Sontag wrote. That’s probably right, but it’s incidental to photographs that transcend the interest and desire of their maker and, in the process, shatter the idea of ‘freaks’ as a stable category of experience. Sontag rushed to rescue the idea. 

“‘In photographing dwarfs, you don’t get majesty and beauty,’ she insisted. ‘You get dwarfs.’ She noted with bemusement that in Arbus’s pictures people who are ‘pathetic, pitiable, as well as repulsive’ look ‘cheerful, self-accepting, matter-of-fact.’ She wondered, ‘Do they know how grotesque they are? It seems as if they don’t.’ It’s an interesting complaint, suggesting that people who look or behave in unusual ways merit sympathy from the rest of us only if they visibly assent to our disgust with them. Saying such things shows how far Sontag was willing to go in a campaign that aimed, beyond Arbus, at photography itself.”

Hilton Kramer, The New York Times, 1972
“The power of these pictures does not derive from their subject matter alone. It derives in equal degree from the style Miss Arbus developed to deal with them. This style, which lavishes an extraordinary candor and sympathy on her subjects, is almost an antistyle. It is the complete opposite of the kind of photographic vision that aspires to ‘catch’ a split-second moment of glimpsed experience and ‘frame’ it forever in a perfect composition.”

Holland Cotter, The New York Times, 2016
“Street photography was the advanced mode of the day, and practitioners like Lee Friedlander, William Klein, Helen Levitt and Garry Winogrand all claimed New York City as their turf. So did Lisette Model, a Viennese émigré with whom Arbus studied briefly. Ms. Model didn’t give her student much formal advice. Instead, she urged her to ease away from the stance of objectivity then considered requisite for serious photography and instead establish emotional relationships with her subjects, and see where that would take her. For Arbus, the advice was heaven-sent. It gave her permission to be the artist she was ready to be.”

Germaine Greer, The Guardian, 2005
“What [Arbus’s] work does not show is compassion, which is something to be grateful for. If I’d thought Arbus felt compassion for me, I’d have socked her.”

Edition details

• Publisher: David Zwirner Books
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1644230658
• ISBN 13: 9781644230657
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 496
• Editor: Rosenberg Max