Diane Arbus Revelations
, the most complete presentation of the artist’s work ever assembled, concludes its more than two-year international tour at the Walker Art Center from June 17 through September 10. Organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), this major retrospective brings together nearly 200 photographs drawn from major public and private collections throughout the world, many of which have never before been exhibited. The exhibition features classically hung galleries interspersed with three “libraries,” discrete spaces that illuminate Arbus’ working method and intellectual influences through the display of such materials as contact sheets, cameras, letters, notebooks, and other writings as well as books and ephemera from her personal library. Diane Arbus Revelations explores the full range and depth of her achievement and wide-reaching influence on legions of photographers.
Celebrating the exhibition will be a pre-opening Panel Discussion on Thursday, June 15, and a Preview Party on Friday, June 16. (Details follow.)
Diane Arbus (1923–1971) found most of her subjects in New York City, a place that she explored as both a known geography and as a foreign land. She was primarily a photographer of people she discovered in the metropolis and its environs during the 1950s and 1960s. Her “contemporary anthropology”—portraits of couples, children, carnival performers, nudists, middle class families, transvestites, people on the street, zealots, eccentrics, and celebrities—stands as an allegory of postwar America, an exploration of the relationship between appearance and identity, illusion and belief, theater and reality. Some of her best known images—identical twins in New Jersey; a “Jewish giant” slouching to fit in a living room scaled to his diminutive parents; and a young couple on Hudson Street whose demeanors evoke both early adolescence and late middle age—have become photographic icons.
At the same time, Arbus was committed to photography as a medium that is obliged to tangle with facts. She had no interest in improving upon the reality she confronted or in creating images that mirror a preconceived view. Many of her subjects face the camera in implicit awareness of their collaboration in the portrait-making process. Her photographs render the encounter between photographer and subject as a self-conscious meeting, one that becomes a central drama in the picture. The result is a body of work that penetrates the psyche with all the force of a personal encounter and, in doing so, broadens our understanding of ourselves and those around us.
Arbus (born Diane Nemerov in New York City in 1923) first began taking pictures in the early 1940s. While working in partnership with her husband Allan Arbus as a stylist collaborating in their fashion photography business, she continued to take pictures on her own. She studied photography with Berenice Abbott in the 1940s and with Alexey Brodovitch in the mid-1950s. It was Lisette Model’s photographic workshop, however, that inspired her, around 1956, 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 magazines, she published more than 100 pictures, including portraits and photographic essays, some of which originated as personal projects, occasionally accompanied by her own writing.
In 1962—apparently searching for greater clarity in her images and for a more direct relationship with the people she was photographing—she began to turn away from the 35mm camera favored by most of the documentary photographers of her era. She started working with a square format (2 1/4-inch twin-lens reflex) camera and began making portraits marked by a formal classical style that has since been recognized as a distinctive feature of her work. Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C. 1962, Retired man and his wife at home in a nudist camp one morning, N.J. 1963, and the virtually unknown work, Girl on a stoop with baby, N.Y.C 1962—all on view in the exhibition—are each triumphant examples of Arbus’ technique.
Arbus was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1963 and 1966 for her project on “American Rites, Manners, and Customs.” She augmented her images of New York and New Jersey with visits to Pennsylvania, Florida, and California, photographing contests and festivals, public and private rituals. “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,” she wrote. “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.”
Although her work appeared in only a few group shows during her lifetime, her photographs generated a good deal of critical and popular attention. 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 pictures in accordance with her evolving vision. Notable among her late works are the images of her Untitled series, made at residences for people with developmental disabilities between 1969 and 1971. These images echo in many respects a number of works produced earlier in her career: Fire eater at a carnival, Palisades Park, N.J. 1956; A child in her nightgown, Wellfleet, Mass. 1956; and Bishop by the sea, Santa Barbara, Cal. 1964. In 1970 Arbus made a portfolio of original prints entitled “A box of 10 photographs” which was to be the first of a series of limited editions of her work. She committed suicide in July 1971.
Diane Arbus Revelations provides a unique and long-awaited opportunity to explore the breadth and depth of Arbus’ accomplishments. Contemplating many of the lesser known, but often equally significant works in the context of the iconic images will serve to illuminate them and reveal, within a complex vocabulary of expression, a remarkably original and consistent vision.
Arbus’ gift for rendering strange those things we consider most familiar continues to challenge our assumptions about the nature of everyday life and compels us to look at the world in a new way. By the same token, her ability to uncover the familiar within the exotic enlarges our understanding of ourselves. Her devotion to the principles of the art she practiced—without deference to any extraneous social, political, or even personal agenda—has produced a body of work that is often shocking in its purity, in its bold commitment to the celebration of things as they are. Her refusal to patronize the people she photographs is in fact a tribute to the singularity of each and every one of us and constitutes a deep and abiding humanism.
In conjunction with Diane Arbus Revelations, Random House has published a 352-page fully illustrated book featuring essays by Sandra S. Phillips and Neil Selkirk, as well as an extensive chronology by Elisabeth Sussman and Doon Arbus based on documents in the Arbus archives, including many excerpts from the artist’s writings.
RELATED PROGRAMS
Opening Events
Panel Discussion: The Revelations of Diane Arbus
Thursday, June 15, 7 pm,
Cinema
Free tickets available from 6 pm at the Bazinet Garden Lobby desk
Diane Arbus revolutionized the art she practiced, and her achievement continues to be a wholly original force in photography. At the time of her death in 1971, she left behind a profound and startling body of work that renders the familiar strange and uncovers the familiar within the exotic. Join Elisabeth Sussman, exhibition co-curator and Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney Museum of American Art; Jeff L. Rosenheim, associate curator in the department of photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Neil Selkirk, photographer and exclusive printer for the Estate of Diane Arbus since 1971, for a panel discussion on the artist’s influences and the evolution of her distinctive vision. Moderated by Walker associate curator Elizabeth Carpenter.
Preview Party
Friday, June 16, 9 pm–12 midnight
$20 ($10 Walker members)
Celebrate the opening of the exhibition with a party inside and out. Dance to live music by the local band Redstart, express your creative side in the art lab with the hands-on activity Sit, Snap, Print, or simply enjoy the summer night on the terraces. Wolfgang Puck appetizers are complimentary; cash bars are available throughout the evening. Receive one free ticket when you join the Walker as a new member. To purchase tickets or memberships, call 612.375.7600 or visit walkerart.org.
Sponsored by Target.
Target Free Thursday Nights
Thursday, June 15
Panel Discussion: The Revelations of Diane Arbus, 7 pm
Cinema
(See description above.)
Thursday, June 22
Gallery Talk: Photography as Social Process, 7 pm
Meet in the Bazinet Garden Lobby.
For any artist photographing people, the relationship of artist to subject is complicated. In conjunction with the exhibition, photographer Katherine Turczan discusses the social process of taking pictures and explains how Arbus’ work influenced her own.
Thursday, July 6
Book Club
The Artist’s Bookshelf: Dracula by Bram Stoker, 7 pm
Free, reservations required. Call 612.375.7600.
In addition to nearly 200 photographs, the exhibition Diane Arbus Revelations contains three “libraries” that illuminate the artist’s working method and intellectual influences through the display of such materials as contact sheets, cameras, letters, and a selection of books from Arbus’ personal collection. Among these is the classic text Dracula. Though published in 1897, this story still startles the contemporary reader with its depictions of vampires and an eerie sensibility that continues to haunt us. Before the discussion, join a free tour of the exhibition at 6 pm. Books are available in the Walker Shop and at the Minneapolis Public Library (www.mplib.org). Presented in partnership with the Friends of the Minneapolis Public Library.
Thursday, July 13
Gallery Talk: Diane Arbus and the History of Photography, 7 pm
Meet in the Bazinet Garden Lobby.
The images of Diane Arbus are firmly anchored not only within the history of photography, but within the history of America. Here to put these pictures into context is Vince Leo, photographer and professor of the History of Photography at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Leo will discuss Arbus’ influence on generations of contemporary photographers and the reflection of our cultural history as seen in her work.
Thursday, July 20
Gallery Talk: The Magazine and the Photograph, 7 pm
Meet in the Bazinet Garden Lobby.
Like most photographers of her time, Diane Arbus looked to magazines as a means of earning a living taking pictures. Her assignments with publications such as Esquire and Harper’s Bazaar offered her an opportunity to work and have her pictures published, and gave her access to people and events she might not have been able to photograph otherwise. For this talk Elizabeth Culbert, associate photo editor of The New Yorker magazine, looks back at Arbus’ magazine work from a contemporary editor’s perspective and discusses the often fluid boundaries between commercial and fine art photography.
Target Free Thursday Nights are sponsored by Target. Additional support provided by the Institute for Museum and Library Services.
Gallery Tours
Thursday, June 22
1 pm, Free with gallery admission
Thursday, June 22
6 pm, Free
Friday, June 23
1 and 6 pm, Free with gallery admission
Saturday, June 24
12 noon, Free with gallery admission
Sunday, June 25
12 noon, Free with gallery admission
Thursday, June 29
6 pm, Free
Sunday, July 2
12 noon, Free with gallery admission
Thursday, July 6
6 pm, Free
Friday, July 7
1 pm, Free with gallery admission
Thursday, July 13
1 pm, Free with gallery admission
Thursday, July 13
6 pm, Free
Sunday, July 16
12 noon, Free with gallery admission
Sunday, July 23
12 noon, Free with gallery admission
Friday, July 28
1 pm, Free with gallery admission
Thursday, August 10
6 pm, Free
Sunday, August 13
12 noon, Free with gallery admission
Friday, August 18
6 pm, Free with gallery admission
Sunday, August 20
12 noon, Free with gallery admission
Thursday, August 24
1 pm, Free with gallery admission
Thursday, August 31
6 pm, Free
Sunday, September 3
12 noon, Free with gallery admission
Saturday, September 9
12 noon, Free with gallery admission
Sunday, September 10
12 noon, Free with gallery admission