Boy

Kate Andrews

In Homage To...

Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus worked as a fashion and magazine photographer in New York. When she took her early work to show John Szarkoski, then Director of Photograpy at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he felt she was not quite acheving the kind of descriptive clarity her work needed. He introduced her to the work of the great German documentary photographer, August Sander, with its carefully composed portraits through which he attempted to catalogue the types that composed the German nation.

She saw people on the streets who fascinated her because they were in some way 'odd' and asked if she could photograph them, building up a gallery of 'freaks. Arbus used a square medium-format, often with flash, and had a highly developed ability for capturing a moment when people were in some way off-guard or apparently over some edge of normality.

Among the people she photographed were many exotics of one type or another, from albino sword swallowers through Jewish giants and hermaphrodites to twins and transvestites. Most normal are her pictures taken on an assignment in a nudist colony.

She wanted to lift the stones of America and see what was underneath them, to photograph 'things which nobody would see unless I photographed them.'

Arbus committed suicide in 1971

Find out more about Diane Arbus at A Gallery for Fine Photography, New Orleans.

Source: Photography at About.com