Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus’s poignant black-and-white portrait photography captured life at the margins of American society. Her subjects included teenagers, circus performers, nudists, middle-class families, and the elderly—figures traditionally elided from fine art frames. Her intimate, compelling compositions provided raw, psychological insights that challenged dominant conventions regarding the photographer’s role and distance from her subject. Arbus, who studied photography under Berenice Abbott, Alexey Brodovitch, and Lisette Model, rose to prominence with commercial and editorial work for publications including Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, and Artforum. The Museum of Modern Art included her work in its landmark “New Documents” exhibition in 1967, cementing her legacy as a fine artist. Following Arbus’s tragic early death in 1972, her photographs were included in a solo pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Arbus’s work has since been shown in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, London, San Francisco, and many other cities. It belongs in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Moderna Museet, and the Tate, among others.