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Average customer rating:

A glorious exhibition of Diane Arbus
Beautiful book
Distortions
well done retrospective for a great show
A brilliant tribute to a great artist

Diane Arbus Revelations
Diane Arbus
Manufacturer: Random House
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Diane Arbus: Monograph (Aperture Monograph)
Diane Arbus: A Biography
Friedlander
Richard Avedon Portraits
Diane Arbus: Untitled

ASIN: 0375506209
Release Date: 2003-09-30

Amazon.com

Muscle men, midgets, socialites, circus performers and asylum inmates: in the 1950s and '60s, photographer Diane Arbus (1923-1971) cast her strong eye on them all, capturing them as no one else could. Her documentary-style photos of society's margin-walkers were objective and reverential, while she often portrayed so-called normal people looking far more freakish than the freaks. Her powerful work was well-received in its day. Arbus received Guggenheim Fellowships in 1963 and 1966 and was included in a major show at MOMA in 1967. But her work entered the realm of near-myth after her 1971 suicide.

Posthumously cast as everything from patron saint of the underdog to a crass exploiter of the mentally challenged, Arbus has curiously never had a large retrospective until the show Revelations was organized by Arbus' family and SF MOMA. The accompanying catalogue is an oversized, sumptuous, beautifully printed tome. It includes all of the artist's iconic photographs as well as many that have never been publicly exhibited, including many pages of contact sheets, journal entries, and family snapshots. This work is so strong, it's mind-blowing. The giant in his apartment with his parents looks absolutely regal, his parents sad and confused. Are those crazy people always so happy? And what to make of this moment of extreme tenderness between a dominatrix and her client? This is a book worth hours of your time. --Mike McGonigal

Book Description

Diane Arbus redefined the concerns and the range of the art she practiced. Her bold subject matter and photographic approach have established her preeminence in the world of the visual arts. Her gift for rendering strange those things we consider most familiar, and uncovering the familiar within the exotic, enlarges our understanding of ourselves.

Diane Arbus Revelations affords the first opportunity to explore the origins, scope, and aspirations of what is a wholly original force in photography. Arbus’s frank treatment of her subjects and her faith in the intrinsic power of the medium have produced a body of work that is often shocking in its purity, in its steadfast celebration of things as they are. Presenting many of her lesser-known or previously unpublished photographs in the context of the iconic images reveals a subtle yet persistent view of the world.

The book reproduces two hundred full-page duotones of Diane Arbus photographs spanning her entire career, many of them never before seen. It also includes an essay, “The Question of Belief,” by Sandra S. Phillips, senior curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and “In the Darkroom,” a discussion of Arbus’s printing techniques by Neil Selkirk, the only person authorized to print her photographs since her death. A 104-page Chronology by Elisabeth Sussman, guest curator of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art show, and Doon Arbus, the artist’s eldest daughter, illustrated by more than three hundred additional images and composed mainly of previously unpublished excerpts from the artist’s letters, notebooks, and other writings, amounts to a kind of autobiography. An Afterword by Doon Arbus precedes biographical entries on the photographer’s friends and colleagues by Jeff L. Rosenheim, associate curator of photographs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. These texts help illuminate the meaning of Diane Arbus’s controversial and astonishing vision.

Customer Reviews:

A glorious exhibition of Diane Arbus.......2007-01-16

The legacy of dead artists is always in the hands of others. As Doon Arbus, Diane's daughter, laments, some go way to far in "analyzing" the work of her mother. (For a particularly abominable and repulsive example of this, see Anthony Lee and John Stultz's "Diane Arbus: Family Albums".)

This gigantic Arbus exhibition was mounted by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It features 200 Arbus photos, spanning her entire work and more than 300 auxillary images of her notebooks, darkroom and so on.

There are several short, informative and informed essays (unlike the aforementioned "Family Albums).

The production is gorgeous.

What is unfortunate about Arbus' work is that it is rarely explained in detail. People see Arbus' work and conclude that she really saw these weird people in the wild, so to speak. The reality is shown in fair detail here. For example, Arbus' absolute classic "Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park" is shown with a contact sheet making it clear that Arbus took the one image that showed this little boy in a freakish pose. The other 11 images show a normal young boy playing. But Arbus wanted her subjects to appear as if they were trying out for a freak show. That was her point. That's why, for example, Arbus photographed "Dominatrix embracing her client" instead of a family picnic with everyone smiling for the camera.

Arbus - and this exhibition demonstrates the point - used electronic flash and high contrast to make her subjects appear weird. Weird was Arbus' metier. You can see this again in the contact sheet from which her freakish "Boy at a parade" is taken. Arbus does not print the sprightly looking woman holding a "Support Our Boys" sign and an American flag. No, she prints the pimply faced, self-concious boy wearing a plastic straw hat, a bow tie and carrying an American flag. She prints it because the harsh strobe makes the uncomfortable boy look like a freak.

Arbus was fascinated by the unsual, including twins and triplets. She suffered from various psychological problems, possibly alcoholism and drug addiction and killed herself.

She left behind a magnificient body of work, one that too often (again, see the awful "Family Albums") is subjected to academic balderdash.

In "Dane Arbus: Revelations", Arbus the person, Arbus the photographer is presented in splendid detail. It's a marvelous work.

Jerry

Beautiful book.......2007-01-12

I had the great fortune to see Revelations in person when the show was at the MET in NYC in 2004. There is nothing like seeing actual prints in person but this gorgous book is the next best thing. The paper stock is top notch as is the binding. I proudly display this book on my coffee table for family and friends to enjoy.

Distortions.......2006-08-10

Diane Arbus Revelations may be a bargain, price-wise. However, there are many other women photographers who have produced much finer photographs. To me this book reveals Arbus as one who used photographs very selectively to portray a distorted, negative view of a subject. She seemed to exploit gloom as a trademark to make herself unique and gain notice.

The well-known Jewish Giant portrait of Eddie Carmel and his "dismayed" parents is a case in point of her deception. On page 300-301 is the enlargement of frame number 1 of the contact sheet shown on page 209. Obviously, it was hastily shot before the family was ready or in position for what they thought was to be a warm, family portrait. It was a trick pulled on the unsuspecting, and it does not truly represent anything other than people puzzling over where they should stand for the pictures to come.

In contrast, from the contact sheet on page 164, she selected the most obviously contrived pose of the Child With A Toy Hand Grenade, which appears on page 104-105 and as the enlargement she is holding in the Steven Frank photograph on page 208.

As a study in promoting a particular, melancholy viewpoint and imposing it on naive subjects kind enough to be photographed, this book may be useful. But for honest photography, there are other books.

well done retrospective for a great show.......2006-04-13

This was one of the greatest photography retrospectives and the book pretty much summarizes as well as delves deeply into the issues covered by the show. If you missed the exhibition, this book is a good substitute. If you want to know about what you saw in the show, this is an indispensable guide. Highest quality reproductions, even in the paperback.

A brilliant tribute to a great artist.......2004-08-05

Diane Arbus was best-known for her stark, black-and-white photographs of the outer fringes of society. She was very much of her time period, since the things she had to go outside of the lines to photograph (inter-racial couples, people with tattoos, drag queens, etc.) are now a part of every day life. I was fortunate enough to see a display of her work at the L.A. County Museum of Art, and this volume is a wonderful companion to the show. Not only are all the plates from the show included, but also copies of correspondence, pictures of her cameras, and the story of her sad, short life. In many ways, she was ahead of her time, with the un-smiling, un-flattering portraits of real people, at a time when most photography was glossy, and reality was still somewhat hidden.

Like most brilliant artists, she was troubled and was not happy with her life. She took her life at a relatively young age, before she could see the modern world, reflected from her early photographs. It is a pity, but we are lucky to have the photographs of Diane Arbus live on.

Diane Arbus: Monograph (Aperture Monograph)

Average customer rating:

Exactly what I expected. . .
"Cast A Cold Eye On Life, On Death. Horseman, Pass By!" Epitaph of W.B. Yeats
You Must Change Your Life
Our World in the Eyes of Diane Arbus
Very Intriguing!

Diane Arbus: Monograph (Aperture Monograph)
Marvin Israel
Manufacturer: Aperture
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Similar Items:

Diane Arbus: A Biography
Diane Arbus Revelations
Diane Arbus: Untitled
Richard Avedon Portraits
Diane Arbus: Magazine Work

ASIN: 0893816949
Release Date: 2005-06-15

Amazon.com

Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph was originally published in 1972, one year after the artist's death, in conjunction with a retrospective of her work at the Museum of Modern Art. Edited and designed by Arbus's daughter, Doon, and her friend and colleague, painter Marvin Israel, the monograph contains eighty of her most masterful photos. The images in this newly published edition, marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the collection's original publication, were printed from new three-hundred-line-screen duotone film, allowing for startlingly clear reproduction. The impact of the collection is heightened by the introduction, which contains excerpts of audio tapes in which Arbus discusses her experiences as a photographer and her feelings about the often bizarre nature of her subjects. Diane Arbus's work has indelibly impacted modern visual sensibilities, evidenced by the intensely personal moments captured in this powerful group of photographs.

Book Description

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 1940s and studied photography with Berenice Abbott in the late 1940s and with Alexey Brodovitch in the 1950s. 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 simply want 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 with 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 1960s, 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 last 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.

When Diane Arbus died in 1971 at the age of forty-eight, she was already a significant influence-- even something of a legend-- among photographers, although only a relatively small number of her most important pictures were widely known at that 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 twenty-fifth 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.

Customer Reviews:

Exactly what I expected. . ........2007-03-08

I bought this book as a birthday gift for my twenty-one year old niece. She is a photographer who would very much like to take photographs professionally. I read about Diane Arbus in a news story because there was a movie which was recently released into theaters, which gave a fictional account of her life. She seemed like a very strong woman, with a lot of the same tastes as my niece. When I got the book it was wrapped, and I was a little disappointed. But when I gave it to her, I had a chance to look through it. The photographs are top-notch, and striking. Arbus' subject matter and composition are striking. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in photography.

"Cast A Cold Eye On Life, On Death. Horseman, Pass By!" Epitaph of W.B. Yeats.......2006-06-14

It is not overstating the case to say that creating these photographs cost Diane Arbus her life, her suicide followed soon after they were assembled. When you study them, (and you study them, you don't look at them), you quickly understand why. Arbus was a brittle and emotionally volatile woman long before taking these haunting images, the product of a privileged upbringing who cut her teeth in the world of fashion photography, making perfect-looking people look even more perfect. Having refined her technical skills she ventured into the opposite side of that world, seeking out the people society hid and desperately tried to forget.

Arbus said famously that most of us live in fear of a traumatic disaster while her subjects had already endured theirs and were, in a sense, aristocrats as a consequence - free from the fear of being unwanted - secure in the knowledge that they most certainly were unwanted. Arbus was so obsessed with presenting unadulterated reality that she never cropped her photos, indeed, the "live area" of the prints goes beyond the photo and includes some of the film's border - to prove the picture wasn't cropped. She dove into the dark side like an obsessive child at a circus freak show, nothing was disturbing enough to satisfy her and even the commonplace became bizarre by the time she was done with it.

Arbus was passionate about photographing the mentally retarded, but giants, transsexuals, twins, triplets, skinheads, nudists and other bits of social flotsam and jetsam lured her as well. Whether it was a boy holding hand grenades or a teenage couple looking like creepy miniaturized adults, Diane Arbus gravitated for the slice of humanity certain to engender revulsion. Her genius lay in the ability to bring nothing to the proceedings, she approached her subjects on their own terms. Because she did this, the subjects did not "rise" to meet the camera, they remained fixed in their personal nightmares. This made for profound, well-crafted photographs. Arbus didn't see beauty or pathos in her subjects, simply their reality. She invited us to behold what we dread and honor the dignity of her subjects. We are able to do that because we are more or less healthy, and because we can close the book when it becomes too painful; she could not.

Every Arbus photograph is a self-portrait; every lost, hideous freak was Diane Arbus looking in the mirror. For the most part it seems that the people in her pictures survived her completely unsentimental scrutiny, she did not. What's more unsettling is that the popularity of these pictures gave rise to a wave of young copycat photographers who thought it was "cool" to photograph the disadvantaged, disabled, and mentally ill. The copycats never understood that for it to be art you have to care, you have to get involved. Arbus got too involved.

You Must Change Your Life.......2005-04-06

I first came across "An Aperture Monograph" by accident, many years ago. The images were astonishing, and when I later read Susan Sontag's famous essay, I immediately recognized the photographer she was referring to. Arbus' images are unforgettable, and do not diminish in power with time. Wisely, those in control of her estate have not released any of these works as posters, t-shirts, or other consumer items -- you have to buy the book or attend an exhibit if you want to see them. It's possible that the artist's sensibility is so powerful that even with repeated viewing, the photographs would retain their power to surprise.

The exhibit "A Family Album" (currently at the Portland Museum of Art) contains several of Arbus' proof sheets. They demonstrate that Arbus (like many photographers) took many shots of the same subject, in similar poses, before choosing the one image that expressed what she wished to convey. What she was searching for was not so much a dwarf, a transvestite, twins, or any other subject, but her own artistic vision. Sometimes these are unhappy people in opulent surroundings, or people we might think should be miserable and hopeless, conveying a strange sense of command.

It would be a trite observation to say that each of these photographs implies a "story" behind the subject. Any photograph can do that. We are, of course, curious about them. Why do so many of the couples seem distant from each other? What is the older man doing with the boy on the park bench? Others are deliberately suggestive: the nude couple in the forest clearly evokes Adam and Eve; the flower girl at a wedding, a fairy princess emerging from the mist. What saves them from appearing posed or artificial (which they certainly were) is Arbus' ability to give the simultaneous impression that these were candid snapshots. This multi-level presence is the mark of a true artist, in total control of her medium.

The book concludes with several untitled photographs taken at a home for the developmentally disabled. The first of these shows two elderly women, the first couple in the book who seemed truly present with each other, and happy. The final photograph, of a masked woman leading a group through a field, suggests nothing less than the progress of civilization itself.

Arbus' work forces the viewer to look at the world and themselves more deeply. The most apt description is from Rilke's poem, Torso of an Archaic Apollo:

"...nor would this star have shaken the shackles off,
bursting with light, until there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life."

Our World in the Eyes of Diane Arbus.......2004-06-16

A rather interesting, yet democratic photographer, Diane Arbus was an individual who was never afraid. She was a motivational and influential photographer whose life possessed no limits. Her subject matter was unique in that the pictures she took were on the abnormalities of life. These subjects centered mostly on freaks such as midgets, drag queens, giants, hookers, nudists, and drugees. Taking pictures such as these shows that she was a person who was never afraid to display the irregularities of life to the world around us.

Diane Arbus lived life one day, one moment at a time. In this book, I get the feeling that her pictures show a meaning in the way she captured life, not just focusing on the photograph alone. Her subjects depicted on each page makes the viewer wonder how she got herself as well as her subjects in that position. Were they cooperative or not? Did she tell them to strike a pose or did they do it on their own? Each of her pictures in the book have a story behind it and some would seem more interesting than others. From her book, I see that the significance of her life and her photography is through this quote "The thing that's most important to know is that you never know. You're always sort of feeling your way."

Very Intriguing!.......2004-06-16

The photography of Diane Arbus has always intrigued me. Her photographs are beautiful to me not because of the composition or lighting or any tools a photographer might use. They intrigue me because of her subject matter and even more so because of the intentions behind her subject matter. She takes pictures of people that are not considered beautiful, people that are "freaks" or "weirdos", or in some way different. She wants the viewer to identify with her subject in some way. In a way she takes the ugly, the thing that you're afraid to look at on the street and forces you to look at it and beyond that see it as art. She is "not evading facts, not evading what it really looks like". I agree with her purpose. It is best to show thing as they really are and to photograph something familiar or something often looked at is sort of boring to me.

For her, taking pictures was not about the final image - because she believed that anything you plan never turns out the way you intend anyways - but it was about the experience. It was about learning and making connections with her subjects. This was interesting to me because I never thought of photography that way. Mostly when I photograph I am so concerned with the final product, but now I realize that I actually enjoy the process of taking the pictures and dislike the developing. So I see photography in the same way, it is some how meditative and the actual action of photographing helps me release a certain kind of creative energy that I harbor.

Photography Speaks: 150 Photographers On Their Art

Average customer rating:

Photography Speaks: 150 Photographers On Their Art

Manufacturer: Aperture
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Similar Items:

The J. Paul Getty Museum Handbook of the Photographs Collection
A World History of Photography
Light Matters
The Photograph as Contemporary Art (World of Art)
Art Photography Now

ASIN: 1931788502
Release Date: 2005-06-15

Book Description

Produced in conjunction with the preeminent Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Virginia, Aperture's essential series Photography Speaks will be reissued as one newly revised and expanded edition in the fall of 2004. From Matthew Brady to Cindy Sherman, more than 150 artists are represented in this new, combined volume spanning the entire history of the medium. This compendium contains biographical information and an original statement from each artist, accompanied by an example of their work. A favorite with photographers and requisite course material for many students, the discourse on art and artistry contained in this volume is of unprecedented scale, collecting the writing of such diverse photographers as William Henry Fox Talbot, Eugène Atget, Alfred Stieglitz, Lewis Hine, August Sander, Man Ray, Weegee, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Robert Heinecken, and Lucas Samaras. New additions include selections from Nadar, William Eggleston, Eikoh Hosoe, Gordon Parks, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Christian Boltanski, and Rineke Dijkstra. The contributors expound on topics such as their method and intentions, the state of the arts, or the medium itself. Photography Speaks has been and will continue to be a vital reference source, an enduring testament to the art of photography and an engrossing text for artists and enthusiasts alike.

Average customer rating:

excellent read
You don't have to be a photographer to appreciate...
Diane Arbus: A Biography
A little too ugly in a few areas
Genius Causes Loneliness

Diane Arbus: A Biography
Patricia Bosworth
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Similar Items:

Diane Arbus: Monograph (Aperture Monograph)
Diane Arbus Revelations
Diane Arbus: Untitled
Diane Arbus: Magazine Work
Fur - An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus

ASIN: 0393326616

Amazon.com

Opportunities for sensationalism abound in a book about Arbus, who already had a history of severe depressions and a crumbling marriage by the time she began to take the controversial, technically innovative pictures of dwarfs, nudists and drag queens that won her a reputation as "a photographer of freaks." Bosworth balances the lurid details -- rumors that Arbus had sex with her subjects, that she photographed her own suicide in 1971 -- with a nuanced appraisal of an artist whose images captured the uneasy mood of the 1960s by expressing her personal obsessions.

Book Description

The inspiration for the new major motion picture Fur starring Nicole Kidman and Robert Downey Jr.

"Haunted, disturbing….Bosworth has brought us tantalizingly close to her subject." So said Christopher Lehman-Haupt in the New York Times about this biography of the photographer. Diane Arbus exerts a fascination rooted in both her art and her life. Her startling photographic images of dwarves, twins, transvestites, and freaks seemed from the first to redefine both the normal and the abnormal in our lives. Now Steven Shainberg, the highly praised director of Secretary, has directed a film that draws on Arbus's life, work, and obsessions. Nicole Kidman stars as Arbus and Robert Downey Jr. plays her lover. Premiering at Cannes in May 2006, it will draw lavish attention and discussion when it opens in the fall.

Customer Reviews:

excellent read.......2007-01-03

This book, although not authorized by the estate of Diane Arbus, was very insightful to her life and her process as an artist. Arbus was fascinating and the book was illuminating. It is a sad fact that her life ended too early, as do too many fantastic artists like her. One can only imagine what else her legacy might have added with another 30-40 years.

You don't have to be a photographer to appreciate..........2006-08-16

...the life of this woman. In fact, this book isn't so much about photographer or the photographer's life as it is about exploration. Arbus told a teacher that she wanted to capture "evil," while her daughter thinks she meant "the forbidden." Hidden within the life is a multitude of meanings about what is evil, what is identity, the fringes of consciousness and society, and how some can incorporate what they encounter into themselves, and some can't.

Diane Arbus: A Biography.......2006-08-14

Great! Anyone who truly appreciates Arbus' photography and has been exposed to it (for example, the excellent show which the Metropolitan had a few years ago) will love this book. It was especially interesting to me since you really get an inside feel and idea of how Arbus composed and executed her photographs, and what prompted her to photograph her subjects. It also, of course, makes clear how deeply disturbed she was psychologically.

A little too ugly in a few areas.......2005-08-13

Did author Bosworth have to make Mrs. Arbus out to be such a traitor to her Jewish kinfolk that Diane attended a 1930's american Nazi convention and heard the Nazi's making all those mean comments about Jews (Diane's only people mind you) and find the Nazi's interesting instead of appaling! No Bosworth didn't! And why did Bosworth have to point out about Diane's later alleged (sinful, unholy if truly) claim to have had sex with both a man a woman! It wasn't necessary! The rest of the book is mostly ok by me. Diane Arbus whereever you are God bless you and I hope you didn't really do all the things this book says you did.

Genius Causes Loneliness.......2002-12-13

If you study the following two books you likely will realize that Diane Arbus was a genius: "An Aperture Monograph" and "Diane Arbus: Magazine Work." If you've ever tried to be a good photographer, even as a total amateur, you will appreciate her genius even more.

Bravo to Patricia Bosworth for interviewing so many people who are gone now! The following people who knew Diane or who studied her work while she was alive made comments to Bosworth shortly before *they* died: Andy Warhol, Lisette Model, Garry Winogrand, John Putnam (art director of Mad magazine for many years), Bernard Malamud (a friend of Diane's brother Howard Nemerov) and Irving Mansfield (immortalized in an Arbus print as an insecure, greedy man letting his sleazebag wife Jacqueline Susann sit on his bare thighs).

Ever heard of Gail Sheehy, author of the 1970s classic "Passages" that all women pursuing careers in social work and medicine used to read? She's still alive, and you can read in Ms. Bosworth's biography about her encounters with Diane before she (Gail) became famous for "Passages."

Bosworth presents eyewitness testimony about Diane's clinical depression along with medical records. But Bosworth wisely declines to speculate on why the depression persisted for so long or why Diane refused to take lithium shortly after it hit the market in 1970. (Come to think of it, Bosworth omitted that "lithium" detail from the book but divulged it in an interview she did with Popular Photography magazine for their December 1984 issue.)

I'm glad Bosworth annoyed people by presenting evidence but no insight. Here's the only insight she could have provided, and it would have annoyed readers even more. The insightful truth is that Diane was very depressed because her talent made her very lonely. Something inside her drove her constantly to approach new people even though they might have refused her offer for a photograph. Sometimes Diane herself decided after a lot of talking that the person would make a bad photograph. She told one reject (as you can read in the Bosworth book): "I'd never get you without your mask on."

But Diane, with her remarkable curiosity and empathy, just had to keep finding new people. How could she possibly have maintained a close relationship with anybody, even nice guy Allan Arbus (father of her children), when so many fascinating people lurked outside her home? Ergo, you get loneliness and depression.

That doesn't mean another photographer alive today can use genius as an excuse for clinical depression. You can't possibly have that genius because you're living in an age of the Internet when we all can "surf" the way Diane did on foot 35 years ago. What about the other legendary female photographers who were Diane's competitors during the pre-Internet era? Dorothea Lange, Imogen Cummingham, Margaret Bourke White, etc.? None of them committed suicide or did stupid things, and the careers of them all were much longer than Diane's. Even Lisette Model, to whom Diane wrote a suicide note, kept teaching photography until she was 75. So these women didn't use male chauvinism as an excuse to screw up. Neither did Diane. Diane's genius is her excuse for doing everything she did.

I'll close with two observations on Diane. The first you will find in the Bosworth book: "Nobody had such an enlarged sense of reality."

And here's one that's not in the Bosworth book. It's from Richard Lamparski, a writer whose name turns up many times in newspaper databases because he specializes in "whatever happened to" books and columns about actors of the 1950s. You've never heard of Jean Peters, Richard Webb aka Captain Midnight or Anthony Steel? Neither have most people before they read Richard Lamparski. He ain't wealthy as you can imagine. He may or may not have met Diane (his name is absent from the Bosworth bio), but he evidently knew who she was when she was alive. He put the following epigraph at the beginning of his annual catalog of has-been actors in 1972:

"To Diane Arbus (1923 - 1971), who did so much to enlarge the standards of her art and the consciousness of us all."

Average customer rating:

An excellent introduction to Diane Arbus
Arbus was also a wonderful writer
It's nice

Diane Arbus: Magazine Work

Manufacturer: Aperture
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Diane Arbus: Monograph (Aperture Monograph)
Diane Arbus Revelations
Diane Arbus: Family Albums
Diane Arbus: A Biography
Diane Arbus: Untitled

ASIN: 0893812331
Release Date: 2005-06-15

Book Description

One of photography's most original artists examines the celebrities of her time in a remarkable collection of portraits. Diane Arbus: Magazine Work presents more than one hundred portraits and features profiles Arbus wrote to accompany her pictures. Luminaries include Jayne Mansfield, Mae West, William Golding, Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, and many others.Diane Arbus: Magazine Work reveals the growth of an artist who posed no artificial boundary between art and the paying job, and who succeeded, regardless of the outlet, in putting her own uncompromising, indelible stamp on the visual imagination.

An essay by Thomas W. Southall discusses the importance of Arbus's magazine work to her evolving vision.

Customer Reviews:

An excellent introduction to Diane Arbus.......2005-04-28

This reasonably priced paperback collects much of Arbus' more accessible photos. These are photographs she took as commissions for such magazines as "Esquire" and "Harper's Bazaar," and most of them date from the early to mid-1960s. Arbus specialized in taking photos of the eccentric and the offbeat, and many of the subjects of the photos reproduced here were truly bizarre characters such as a man who claims to be the sole heir of the Byzantine Empire and a female Bishop who believes that the end is very near. Arbus also photographed the famous (we see Mae West, Jayne Mansfield, Roddy McDowell, Norman Mailer, Tiny Tim, etc), but did her best work photographing the offbeat and wacky rather than the glamourous.

In a sense, Arbus photographed the uncool side of the Sixties. She wasn't afraid to record the tackier side of the decade, or reveal how working-class people really lived during the psychedelic days. Even though the hairstyles and clothing are now terribly dated, Arbus' gritty vision still rings true, and in her portraits we see the combination of absurdity and tragedy that characterizes many of our lives.

As these are photos that were published in mainstream magazines, there's little of the trademark surreal darkness that characterizes Arbus' best work. I don't think many people would find the photos here to be disturbing in the way that her later work (which focused on circus sideshow performers, freaks, and the mentally retarded) touches uncomfortable chords inside the viewer. So, while the reader will probably get the sense that Arbus is "holding back" somewhat, the very accessibility of the imagery presented here will lure many into a deeper examination of Arbus' work. If you've never seen Arbus' photography and would like to know what the fuss is all about, this is a great place to start.

As a side note, I recently saw many of the photos reproduced here in person at an exhibition in New York. The reproductions in this book are excellent.

Arbus was also a wonderful writer.......2003-04-01

To really understand what an incredible artist Arbus was, I suggest you check this bad boy out. The photographs are, of coures, brilliant, but her text on the subjects contains some really fantastic writing. the OilCan does not think Arbus, or even Mr. Arbus, get thier due. This woman taught Kubrick how to take pictures, for the love of god. A genuine artistic talent!

It's nice.......1999-02-05

The way that the pictures evoke, not memories, but images is just fantastic.

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Great Brook
Covers well over 150 years of photography

Singular Images
Darsie Alexander , Roger Hargreaves , Liz Jobey , Mary Warner Marien , Sheena Wagstaff , Dominic Willsdon , Geoffrey Batchen , David Campany , Nigel Warburton , Val Williams , and Martin Parr
Manufacturer: Aperture
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Criticism & Essays | Photography | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

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reGeneration: 50 Photographers of Tomorrow
Acting the Part: Photography As Theatre
Art Photography Now
Vitamin Ph: New Perspectives in Photography
Acting Out: Invented Melodrama In Contemporary Photography

ASIN: 1597110175
Release Date: 2006-02-01

Book Description

Spanning 170 years, from William Henry Fox Talbot's first negative to Jeff Wall's latest constructed tableau, Singular Images collects thought-provoking essays on individual photographs, one image per writer. The essayists consider, sometimes in highly personal ways, the artist's intention, their own response, the work's technical complexities, its historical context or its formal properties. Each text captures a sense of how challenging it is to create a perfect single piece. Art photography has been increasingly well-surveyed in recent years, but individual works have rarely been written about at length, perhaps because of lingering doubt that a single photograph can command the kind of sustained attention often given to individual paintings or sculptures. Singular Images is a lively inquiry into the value of analyzing individual photographs, and it persuasively encourages the reader to engage at length and in depth with one remarkable piece at a time. With its broad scope and diverse range of issues, it can also be read as an informal--and thoroughly entertaining--introduction to art photography. Featuring essays by some of the most brilliant critical minds in the field, including David Campany on Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, Darsie Alexander on Nan Goldin and Liz Jobey on Diane Arbus.

Customer Reviews:

Great Brook.......2007-04-01

Great book with interesting approches on the images.
I'm glad to have it.

Covers well over 150 years of photography.......2006-09-09

Singular Images: Essays On Remarkable Photographs covers well over 150 years of photography, from Talbot's first negative to the latest changes in photographic art. Essays collect analysis of individual photos however, not the genre as a whole, focusing on a single image's achievements and exploring artist intention, technical and historical background, and the artistic community's response. Black and white photos blend with in-depth analysis to show what makes an achievement exceptional in the photography field.

Americans: The Social Landscape From 1940 until 2006

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Americans: The Social Landscape From 1940 until 2006
Peter Weiermair
Manufacturer: Damiani
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Mitch Epstein: Work
The Photobook: A History - Volume 2
Click Doubleclick:The Documentary Factor
Henri Cartier-Bresson: Scrapbook
5x7

ASIN: 8889431687
Release Date: 2007-03-01

Book Description

A bakers' dozen of the best photographers of the past hundred years, from Helen Levitt and Gordon Parks to Nan Goldin and Ryan McGinley, are brought together here in a series of portfolios expanding on Robert Frank's Americans. Together they consider generations of social upheavals, crises, and shifts in U.S. society, responding to societal problems with attitudes from concerned to ecstatic. Helen Levitt's East Village and Bruce Davidson's are the same, and yet nothing alike, as are Richard Avedon's Texas and Rosalind Solomon's New Orleans, Diane Arbus's periphery and Lee Friedlander's loneliness at the center of the world, Peter Hujar's transsexuals and Larry Clark's boys. While the "concerned photography" of the mid-twentieth century can seem to demand the acceptance of the nonconformist behavior it tracks, and the recognition of social ills, the most recent contributions here avoid those moral undertones, documenting the hedonistic cult of youth, its promiscuity and ideology of fun. They do not judge but may provoke viewers into their own judgments, and always to thought.

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Academic nonsense

Diane Arbus: Family Albums
Anthony W. Lee , and John Pultz
Manufacturer: Yale University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Diane Arbus Revelations
Diane Arbus: Monograph (Aperture Monograph)
Diane Arbus: Untitled
Diane Arbus: Magazine Work
Diane Arbus: A Biography

ASIN: 0300101465

Book Description

Diane Arbus (1923-1971) is renowned for her provocative and unsettling portraits of modern Americans. This book presents a significant body of previously unpublished pictures by Arbus and proposes a radically new way to understand her goals, strategies, and overall work. Diane Arbus: Family Albums examines unknown contact sheets from several of Arbus's portrait sessions, including more than three hundred photographs she took of a New York family one weekend in 1969. Anthony W. Lee and John Pultz put to the test Arbus's claim that she was developing a "family album." They present other images Arbus shot for Esquire magazine (including pictures of the families of Ricky Nelson, Jayne Mansfield, and Ogden Reid) and discuss her interest in photographic groupings of both traditional and alternative families. Challenging common interpretations of Arbus, the authors reveal a photographer far more savvy with the camera, more aware of photography as an artistic and commercial practice, and more sensitive to the social and cultural tensions of the 1960s than has been acknowledged before.

Customer Reviews:

Academic nonsense.......2007-01-03

Two associate professors of art history want to climb the academic career ladder. My oh my, what are they to do? Wait! Zounds! Eureka! Someone has found some contact sheets from a private shooting assignment done by - gasp! - Diane Arbus.

We have the photos! We have a hall! Let's mount an exhibition! By Jove, let's write an essay! Two essays because there are two academics struggling for advancement.

And so it is done. An exhibition. A book to commemorate the exhibition.

And two of the most bizarre, sophmoric, empty-headed art history essays you can imagine. Sophistry of the first order as these two try to make academic hay on a dead photographer.

The photos, most by Arbus, occupy only about half the book. And they are all to be seen elsewhere in more congenial settings. ("Diane Arbus: Revelations," for example.)

The essays are just plain ridiculous. Stereotypical academic writing. Diane Arbus was a good photographer, skilled at capturing otherwise ordinary people in unexpected or odd poses. Had she missed the critical instant in most cases, the photo she is famous for would have been missed. The same can be said of Henri Carier-Bresson in a way, but Arbus was more prone to setting her subjects up, while Cartier-Bresson photographed the moment. Arbus also made heavy use of the unflattering aspects of newly introduced portable electronic flashes to add a harsh edge to her photos which also made her subjects appear unnatural.

But these two academics, Anthony W. Lee and John Pultz, roll out all the holies of left-wing academia. The "youth rebellion" of the 60s. Gay liberation. Emancipated women. You name the left-wing cause and it gets at least one mention in their respective essays. Arbus becomes not merely a photographer, but a social prophet. (I suspect the authors may have seen one too many performances of "Mother Courage".)

Not content with merely turning Arbus into a latter day Nostrodamus, they then proceed to channel themselves into the dead Arbus (a suicide at age 48) and tell us what her last great work would have been, had she not killed herself. They also use these psychic projections for more ruminations on the death of the family.

It felt like my jaw hung open while I read both these essays in full. Like passing an auto accident, I was transfixed, wanting to see what the next horror would be. Believe me, there is no shortage of the horror of vapid intellectual posturing in these two essays. Trees should have been saved rather than wasted in the printing of this academic emptiness.

The only redeeming feature is the production of some of the contact sheets from this 1969 Arbus family portrait shoot. But even that is minimized by the moody, dark printing of the pages. Oh, the drama, the drama! (I must point out that one of the authors is shown on his web page dressed in black; no doubt to make it impossible to non-conformist, artistic spirit.)

This is really an awful thing to have done to Diane Arbus. Her work is strong enough to stand on its own, without this empty-headed academic blather. Anyone who truly appreciates and respects the work of Diane Arbus is better advised to look elsewhere.

Jerry

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The Sublime
a work of startlingly brilliant photographic genius
Some people just don't get it.....
Subjectivity
Diane going over the edge

Diane Arbus: Untitled

Manufacturer: Aperture
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Collections, Catalogues & Exhibitions | Photography | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

General | Photography | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

Photo Essays | Photography | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

Portraits | Photography | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books
Similar Items:

Diane Arbus: Monograph (Aperture Monograph)
Diane Arbus Revelations
Diane Arbus: Family Albums
Diane Arbus: A Biography
Diane Arbus: Magazine Work

ASIN: 089381623X
Release Date: 2005-06-15

Book Description

Photographs by Diane Arbus
Afterword by Doon Arbus

In these photographs Arbus achieves a lyricism, an emotional purity, that sets them apart from all her other accomplishments. Untitled may well be Arbus's most transcendent, most romantic vision. It is a celebration of the singularity and connectedness of each and every one of us. It demands of us what it demanded of her: the courage to see things as they are and the grace to permit them simply to be.

Customer Reviews:

The Sublime.......2005-03-15

All the reviews I've seen of this great work strike one like rhetoric from a Stalinesque apparitchnik circa 1938, wherein the work in incomprehensible unless serviceable to the party, which believes in the goodness of life and the uplift of the handicapped. That this work may not wish to function remotely like this or that its subjects may be incidental to its purposes is apparently unthinkable. All in all, rather mind-boggling, a commentary in an alternate universe where most everyone has never had a sublime experience with art and yet still inexplicably has great interest in it. Parade of the Masked and Grotesque, indeed.

Many of the photos are meant to be...gasp?...Unpleasant and Unnerving sometimes through using Handicapped Persons. It also appears Arbus has dressed and positioned many of them, if I'm not mistaken which is...hushed silence?...Vaguely Mean If You Think About It, Sort Of. I'm sure this was a major ethical, nagging concern before she ended her life some months later.

In conclusion, isn't there some church you should be salivating at rather than polluting the discourse of art with insipid Calvinist twaddle? This is an awe-inspiring, shocking, terrifying and transcendent work of triumphant nihilism that shows no mercy to weak and deluded ideologies.

a work of startlingly brilliant photographic genius.......2005-01-08

Diane Arbus was to photography what Andrew Wyeth was to painting, or what Carson McCullers was to literature. Arbus's work was startingly beautiful--not in the conventional sense, but in the sense that the bare emotions conveyed by her subjects was simply beautiful in its humanity. Arbus photographed people that other photographers of the time weren't interested in capturing on their lenses--she was best at photographing those who lived on the outside of mainstream society, and her work was not only of immense honesty but also provided something of a character study for every person she photographed. This collection is composed of photographs she shot of mentally handicapped or disturbed individuals, shortly before her death. It is an unflinching, honest look at people who are largely either pitied or mocked by society.

Some people just don't get it............2004-02-03

... and I strongly suggest you take the time to go see the penultimate exhibition of Arbus' work that is currently at the San Francisco MOMA and is set to start touring soon.

Arbus' "untitled" work is very similar to her work with couples... it gives power to the powerless, disarms the authoritative. Look at her images of couples in the 50s and 60s... the Men (those in a power position of a relationship) are disconnected, almost bored by the process, while the Women hold your gaze defiantly, challenging the viewer.... menacing. Not to be sexually stereotyped, the images of Mothers and Sons.... the dominant Mothers becoming the dispassionate party while the Son engages you. So too are these untitled images of the "mentally challenged", the handicapped, the children and young adults with Down's Syndrome in the images. They are living in an era where they are shunned and exiled to mental institutions.... but these images show us that they are not the weak and powerless who should be pitied.

In Arbus' earlier images, the power-base in the relationship of people shown set up the dichotomy. In these images, the defiant gazes come from those WE, the *viewer* choose to ignore and treat with indifference.

Subjectivity.......2002-12-10

A sad book, a mind-opening book, and many more things. Viewing these photographs will conjure up completely different personal reactions, depending upon your frame of mind at the time of viewing. That is what is so remarkable about Arbus' work; so many emotions are brought to the surface.

And while I know that some people will be turned off, even repulsed by this final phase of Arbus' work, I strongly disagree with the reviewer from Chico, CA in saying that it would have been better if this work has not been published. This work is not pretty, and it is not candy-coated, but it should be, and thankfully has been, published. Real life is not always pretty, and we each have our own concepts of such ideals. If you are uncomfortable with other's perspectives on beauty and reality, close the book or sell it to someone else. But do not impose your censorship on me.

Diane going over the edge.......2002-02-08

That Diane Arbus is a serious and important artist, there is no doubt. But even the greatest of artists can be wrong.

This is not a book that most people would wish to have on their coffee table, or anywhere in their homes. The images are grotesque, disturbing, cruel, ugly.

These images were made when Arbus's life was spiraling down, when she was more and more lost in her final depression. They provide an insight into her mind that it would have been better not to publish.

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Diane Arbus: The Libraries
Doon Arbus
Manufacturer: Fraenkel Gallery
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Diane Arbus: A Biography

ASIN: 1881337197

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