Talent Development Resources................Diane Arbus

 

I want to photograph the considerable ceremonies of our present because we tend while living here and now to perceive only what is random and barren and formless about it. While we regret that the present is not like the past and despair of its ever becoming the future, its innumerable inscrutable habits lie in wait for their meaning...  These are our symptoms and our monuments. I want simply to save them, for what is ceremonious and curious and commonplace will be legendary. Diane Arbus....(1923-1971)  [randomhouse.com bio]

 

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Diane Arbus is one of the most mysterious, enigmatic, and frighteningly daring artists of the 20th century. Her work emerged from a deeply private place and profoundly affected all those who came into contact with it.  As a young boy I used to stare at her images and wonder, 'How in the world did she get into the room with this person? How did she come to take such a photograph?' That, for me, is the great question for the film. I hope the answer will lead us not to a 'biopic' per se, but to a film that lives up to Arbus' audacious vision. Director Steven Shainberg - who is developing a film on Diane Arbus - with an adaptation by writer Erin Cressida Wilson of Patricia Bosworth's biography.    [quotes from indiewire.com]

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.. .. As NPR's Madeleine Brand describes the Diane Arbus' famous photo, it's "a portrait of two little girls -- maybe they're seven or eight years old. They're wearing matching outfits: white tights, corduroy dresses, and thick white headbands in their dark hair.  "The girls stand shoulder-to-shoulder, their light eyes looking straight into the camera -- straight at us. And the more you look back at them -- the more you stare -- the more you realize how different they are from each other."

Not much is known about how Arbus came to take the twins' photo, Brand reports. The only clue is the title: Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967.  One theory is that Arbus found the girls at a twins convention. Or maybe she happened upon them on the street and snapped their picture. Arbus biographer Patricia Bosworth says the photo encapsulates the photographer's vision.  "She was involved in the question of identity. Who am I and who are you? The twin image expresses the crux of that vision: normality in freakishness and the freakishness in normality." from NPR page photo from book : Diane Arbus : An Aperture Monograph

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The Headless Woman, 1961 This offbeat portrait is from an arresting but generally neglected series of photographs Arbus described as a "Horror Show" in a letter to her friend and advocate Walker Evans.  Arbus discovered the hidden world of B-grade live theater between film screenings in the back rooms of cheap Times Square movie houses or at Hubert's Museum, a flea circus located in the basement of a Forty-second Street penny arcade.  The Headless Woman serves as a subtle but sophisticated observation of how an effect that in the flesh might seem to many an obvious fake -- presumably the actor wears an oversized dress that simply covers her head and body -- when seen by the camera becomes transformed into an inherently ambiguous scene, a surreal mystery.  "These are nightmares to beguile us while we wait," Arbus wrote in 1962, suggesting with a wry sense of humor that the camera is as often an agent of illusion as a diviner of truth.  Jeff L. Rosenheim - from Metropolitan Museum of Art page

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Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats.    ~ ~ A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know. Diane Arbus from Diane Arbus: A Biography -- by Patricia Bosworth

 

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....books:
 

Diane Arbus : An Aperture Monograph

Diane Arbus: A Biography  - by Patricia Bosworth

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. [Amazon.com]

Diane Arbus: Revelations

Diane Arbus: Magazine Work

Diane Arbus: Untitled  by Diane Arbus, Doon Arbus, Yolanda Cuomo
 
 

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