Diane Arbus

The money came from Russeks, the women's wear store on Fifth Avenue that her grandfather co-founded and her father chaired. Diane Nemerov grew up inside that money — maids and governesses, the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, a Depression watched from a distance. She said the only thing she suffered from as a child was never having felt adversity, and the insulation left her hungry for what the money could not buy. At 18, in 1941, she married Allan Arbus, whom she had been seeing since she was 14. He gave her a camera. From 1946 they ran a commercial studio, shooting for Glamour, Seventeen and Vogue, she directing and he photographing — a division of labor even Allan called demeaning. They both hated the fashion world. In 1956 she quit.

From 1956 she studied with Lisette Model, who taught her that the more specific you are, the more general it will be. She worked the streets with a 35mm Nikon, then around 1962 took up the square-format Rolleiflex — frontal, close, brutally clear. Esquire, Harper's Bazaar and The Sunday Times Magazine ran her. Guggenheim fellowships in 1963 and 1966 paid for a project on American rites, manners and customs. In 1967 John Szarkowski put her in New Documents at the Museum of Modern Art with Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand. Nearly 250,000 people came, and the argument started at once.

The argument has never been settled, and both sides are strong. Susan Sontag made the case against in On Photography: the pictures anaesthetise rather than reveal, offering pain and difference as spectacle and leaving the viewer a tourist. Arbus's subjects, she wrote, all looked like inhabitants of one village, and the village was America. The case for is that Arbus photographed people the culture refused to see as individuals, with presence and self-possession, and that many of them sat willingly and knew exactly what they were doing. Sontag conceded that much herself. And the roster is not the legend: alongside carnival performers, nudists, trans people and people with dwarfism and giantism, she photographed a Levittown living room at Christmas and a family on a Westchester lawn, and those are no gentler.

She died by suicide on July 26, 1971, at 48, at the Westbeth Artists Community in Manhattan. She had lived with depressive episodes for years, as her mother had. The work is not explained by the death. In late 1972 the Museum of Modern Art mounted a retrospective that drew the largest attendance in the museum's history to that point and toured North America for three years, and that same year she became the first photographer included in the Venice Biennale. Her estate, run by her daughter Doon, has controlled reproduction and access tightly ever since, closing the correspondence and vetting exhibitions — which critics say has shaped what can be argued about her at all.

Diane Arbus's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C. artwork
  A print sold for 785,000 dollars in 2015, her auction record 1962
• Xmas Tree in a Living Room in Levittown, L.I. artwork
  The suburb given exactly the attention she gave the sideshow 1962
• Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J. artwork
  Cathleen and Colleen Wade — the Met dates the negative 1966 1967
• A Family on Their Lawn One Sunday in Westchester, N.Y. artwork
  The picture that undercuts the legend of what she photographed 1968
• A Jewish Giant at Home with His Parents in the Bronx, N.Y. artwork
  Eddie Carmel, photographed with his mother and father 1970
• Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph book
  Edited by Doon Arbus and Marvin Israel, and never out of print since 1972

• March 14, 1923 aged 0 Born in New York City to the family that owned Russeks Her grandfather Frank Russek co-founded the Fifth Avenue store. Her father David Nemerov chaired it.
• 1941 aged ~18 Marries Allan Arbus at 18 They had been together since she was 14. He gave her a Graflex, her first camera.
• 1956 aged ~33 Quits the fashion studio and begins studying with Lisette Model She also began numbering her negatives that year. The last one was 7459.
• 1962 aged ~39 Trades the 35mm Nikon for a square-format Rolleiflex She said she had grown tired of grain and wanted clarity.
• 1963 aged ~40 Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for American rites, manners and customs Renewed in 1966.
• 1967 aged ~44 New Documents opens at the Museum of Modern Art John Szarkowski showed her with Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand. Nearly 250,000 people came, and someone spat on one of her prints.
• July 26, 1971 aged 48 Dies at 48 She died by suicide. She had experienced depressive episodes for years.
• 1972 aged ~49 MoMA retrospective, and the Venice Biennale The best-attended show in the museum history to that date, and the first time a photographer was included at Venice.
• 2007 aged ~84 The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquires her archive It bought 20 photographs and received the negatives and contact prints of 7,500 rolls of film as a gift from the estate.

• Richard Avedon 1923–2004
  Put movement into fashion photography, then stripped his subjects bare against white paper. friend and collector
• Dorothea Lange 1895–1965
  Documentary photographer whose Depression-era images defined the visual record of the 1930s. documentary predecessor
• Cindy Sherman b. 1954
  Photographed herself as hundreds of other women and insisted that none of it was a self-portrait. influenced
• Andy Warhol 1928–1987
  Pop art pioneer whose Campbell's soup cans and celebrity portraits defined contemporary American art. photographed