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Humanities and Social Sciences Library > Collections > Photography Collection > New York Street Photography Diane Arbus (American, 1923–1971)Born Diane Nemerov in New York City, Arbus began taking photographs in 1941 after learning the basic techniques from Berenice Abbott. She later studied with Alexey Brodovitch and Lisette Model. After her photographs first appeared in Esquire magazine in 1960, she worked extensively as a photojournalist. She also taught photography in the late 1960s at Parsons School of Design, Rhode Island School of Design, and Cooper Union. She was the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships, in 1963 and 1966. In 1967, her photographs were exhibited along with the work of Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander in the New Documents exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Best known for her square photographs taken with a medium-format Rolleiflex camera in the 1960s, Arbus first used a 35mm Nikon. This group of sixteen photographs, all taken on Coney Island, documents the blossoming of Arbus’s mature style. Not only do we see her early fascination with emphasizing the visible photographic qualities of her prints—Model recalled that her first photographs “were nothing but grain”—we also witness her willful exploration of the photograph’s visual field. In fact, it was around the time of these photographs that Arbus gave up cropping negatives and began to rely on a more intimate relationship, as seen through the viewfinder, to her subjects. In these pictures, she offers an extremely moving portrait that shifts between the bright beaches and shadowlands of a vanishing Coney Island. “In the beginning of photographing I used to make very grainy things. I’d be fascinated by what the grain did because it would make a kind of tapestry of all these little dots and everything would be translated into this medium of dots. Skin would be the same as water would be the same as sky and you were dealing mostly in dark and light not so much in flesh and blood.… It was my teacher, Lisette Model, who finally made it clear to me that the more specific you are, the more general it’ll be.” Diane Arbus Woman on the boardwalk, Coney Island, N.Y., 1956 16 gelatin silver prints (printed later by Neil Selkirk) |
