Diane Arbus Case Study

Diane Arbus was a photographer who is famous for her black and white square-format photographs of marginalized people in society, including little people, circus people and the transgendered. Although Diane was heavily criticized for exploiting her subjects as freaks, I feel strongly that she actually had a deep love and admiration for the people that she chose to photograph. At least that’s the feeling that I get when I look at her work. For many years I have felt a connection to her photographs because portrait photography appeals to me and because I lived a large portion of my life in Manhattan and loved to photograph all of the interesting people that I came across during my work in the theatre.  I never considered anyone to be freak, but found that the unique qualities of others made the world a more beautiful place. I see that in Diane’s work and I think that people such as Susan Sontag misunderstood her work and judged her too harshly.

Diane Arbus was a thrill-seeker who suffered from depression. She grew up in a strict, Jewish and wealthy family in New York City. Her family owned a famous department store on Fifth Avenue. Diane’s older brother, Howard Nemerov, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and U.S. poet laureate. Her younger sister, Renée Sparkia, was a sculptor and designer. After retiring from the department store, their father, David Nemerov, had a very successful career as a painter. At the age of 18, Diane married Allan Arbus, who worked in the advertising department at her father’s store. Allan gave Diane her first camera and Diane began to study under photographer Berenice Abbott. Diane and Allan began taking fashion photographs that were featured in advertisements for the store. Eventually they began a fashion photography business together, with Allan taking most of the photographs and Diane doing the styling. Their business was very successful and they revolutionized the fashion photography business. Diane grew tired of working with her husband and began to explore her own artistry, eventually taking photography classes at The New School. This is when she began photographing people on the streets of New York City.

Arbus combined the realistic nature of photography with its expressive possibilities. Her exploration of how people lived differently, yet the same and with acceptance and rejection, created strong visual images that created controversy during her time and beyond. Some of the criticism that I have read of her work seems so outdated and outrageous to me. I think her work made people uncomfortable and the only way they could fight that feeling was to rail against the work itself. I don’t see her images as exploitative. I think they are strong and beautiful. They show imperfect people who are not afraid to look straight into the camera lens and allow you to see them in all of their glory. Her work challenges the viewer to see beauty differently. Diane also photographed seemingly normal people in a way that made them look unusual. She could take recognizable people and make them seem as odd as the supposed freaks she also photographed. Her use of dramatic lighting and the exploration of tension in her photographs could make even the most mundane scene seem somehow twisted.