Diane Arbus Biography

Like Vincent van Gogh, Kurt Cobain and River Phoenix, Diane Arbus’s incredible success and early, tragic death have forever immortalised her. However, as with many pop-culture ‘legends’ who are catapulted to fame following the general cacophony surrounding their own tragedies, her premature death often has a way of occluding her art. The legend of Diane Arbus is untouchable. How then, to organise and curate an exhibition of her work that rejects sensationalism? Well, the National Art Gallery has decided to eschew Arbus’s well-told ‘origin myth’ in favour of focusing on her inspirations, her life and her legacy.

This show, held in a modest wing on the upper floor of the National Art Gallery, is a not an attempt to redefine Diane Arbus. It is,

Arbus was born in New York and first ventured into photography with her husband Allen Arbus after the conclusion of World War Two. The pair gained fame within the blossoming fashion community for their work, but Arbus would later divorce her husband and begin the most fateful part of her career alone.

She began actively pursuing the strange in the early 1960s. Arbus would camp out in New York’s gritty streets, seeking out sideshow carnivals and transexual clubs. She caught children off-kilter in the park, saw regular people on bad days and good and she sought out the marginalised along the Lower East Side. In the cases of Woman with a beehive hairdo and Girl in a watch cap (both 1965), Arbus didn’t even bother to disguise the tears and marks on her negatives. Such was the emotional authenticity of her work; as many have noted, it was her belief that the more specific a photograph of something was the less general its messages became. For the most part, Arbus uses her camera not to comment or judge her subjects, but as a “license to enter the specifics of other people’s