Diane Arbus Biography Quotes 17 Report mistakes

Early Life and Family
Diane Arbus was born Diane Nemerov on March 14, 1923, in New York City, into a well-to-do family that owned Russeks, a Fifth Avenue department store. Her parents, David and Gertrude Nemerov, raised their three children on Manhattan's Upper East Side, where the comforts of privilege insulated them from the harsher edges of city life. Diane's older brother, Howard Nemerov, would become a distinguished poet and later the U.S. Poet Laureate, and her sister, Renée, pursued painting. From early on, Diane absorbed the visual texture of New York and the particularities of people, but she did not initially set out to make pictures. The family's department store exposed her to fashion and display, laying a foundation for the aesthetic sophistication that later informed her photographic compositions.

Marriage and Commercial Photography
At 18 she married Allan Arbus, a charismatic aspiring photographer she had met as a teenager. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the couple worked together in fashion photography, supplying images to publications such as Glamour, Vogue, and Harper's Bazaar. The division of labor often placed Allan behind the camera while Diane styled, conceived, or co-directed the shoots; over time, she also photographed, developing a precise feel for framing, texture, and light. The collaborative studio, known as Diane & Allan Arbus, carried the sophistication of postwar fashion while never quite satisfying Diane's deepening curiosity about people outside the realm of aspirational imagery. The couple had two daughters, Doon (born 1945) and Amy (born 1954), who would later become central to preserving and extending their mother's legacy. The marriage, though productive and affectionate at points, grew strained as Diane sought an independent artistic voice, and the pair eventually separated, divorcing in 1969. Allan Arbus later became widely known as an actor, but their early partnership remained crucial to Diane's professional grounding.

Turning to a Personal Vision
In the mid-1950s, Diane Arbus began studying with Lisette Model at the New School for Social Research. Model's encouragement to confront the complexities of human presence, without sentimentality or ornament, proved catalytic. Diane moved away from commercial assignments and toward an uncompromising form of portraiture that embraced encounter, risk, and shared vulnerability. She first experimented with 35mm cameras in city streets and parks, then gradually adopted the square-format twin-lens Rolleiflex that facilitated her distinctive, face-to-face engagement. This transition coincided with a decisive break from the conventions of fashion: she chose subjects on her own terms, often spending sustained time with them in their homes or communities.

Method, Subjects, and Style
Arbus became known for direct, frontal portraits of people on the margins and in the interstices of American life, carnival performers, twins, nudists, transgender people, middle-class families in their living rooms, socialites after midnight. She sought not spectacle but a mutual recognition between sitter and photographer, an invitation to reveal the oddness embedded in the ordinary and the ordinariness within the unusual. Works such as Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C. 1962 and Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J. 1967 epitomize her ability to distill a person's presence into a single, indelible image, framed squarely and often with a flash that flattened space while heightening psychological intensity.

Over time, she built relationships with many of her subjects, returning for multiple visits and negotiating the terms of depiction with unusual candor. The resulting photographs occupy a charged space between documentary and performance. Her square prints foregrounded symmetry, direct gaze, and precise detail; yet the pictures are rarely clinical. An Arbus portrait often reads like a question asked in the form of a picture: What, exactly, makes us who we are? Where do we locate dignity and strangeness, and how do they coexist?

Teaching and Editorial Work
While pursuing personal projects, Arbus earned a living through assignments for magazines including Esquire and Harper's Bazaar. Those editorial contexts, often under progressive art direction, gave her room to pursue stories about subcultures, social rituals, and the textures of urban life. She also taught at institutions such as the Parsons School of Design, Cooper Union, and the Rhode Island School of Design, guiding younger photographers in the practice of sustained looking and ethical engagement. Her teaching emphasized discipline, contact sheets, repeated visits, honest exchange, and the courage to photograph what genuinely mattered to the photographer, rather than what might sell or please.

Exhibitions, Fellowships, and Critical Reception
Arbus's work gained major institutional recognition in the 1960s. She received Guggenheim Fellowships in 1963 and again in 1966, supporting projects that investigated "American rites, manners, and customs". In 1967, John Szarkowski, then director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, included her alongside Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander in the landmark exhibition New Documents. The show marked a broader shift in American photography toward the personal, skeptical, and observational, what Szarkowski saw as a departure from social reform toward a more open, ambiguous witness. Arbus's pictures drew intense response: admiration for their clarity and fearlessness, discomfort at their intimacy, and debate about the ethics of looking.

Critical discussion continued to evolve. Some writers lauded her ability to expose social fictions and to honor her subjects' singularity. Others questioned whether the photographs reinforced difference or invited viewers to gaze at otherness. Susan Sontag's later critique, for example, cast Arbus as a diagnostician of estrangement, provoking rebuttals from photographers and curators who knew how carefully Arbus worked with her sitters. The intensity of this discourse testified to the photographs' power and their refusal to settle into a single moral or aesthetic category.

Later Years and Death
By the late 1960s, Arbus had established a mature approach: extended projects, precise printing, and a growing network of editors, curators, and fellow artists. She continued to photograph in New York and beyond, making series in places such as nudist camps and sideshows, and inside domestic spaces where the veneer of normalcy could tilt into revelation. Friends and colleagues like Lisette Model and Marvin Israel remained important to her thinking; Israel, an art director and artist, became a close collaborator and later worked with her daughter Doon Arbus on posthumous publications and exhibitions.

Despite professional achievements, Arbus contended with periods of depression. On July 26, 1971, she died by suicide in New York City at the age of 48. Her death shocked the photographic community and prompted an outpouring of tributes from those who had learned from her precision, bravery, and presence with people. She left behind an unfinished body of work, contact sheets, notebooks, and a circle of family and colleagues committed to stewarding her legacy.

Posthumous Recognition and Publications
The year after her death, MoMA organized a retrospective curated by John Szarkowski. The exhibition, accompanied by a now-classic Aperture monograph edited by Doon Arbus and Marvin Israel, introduced a wider public to the clarity and gravity of her portraits. The book's sequencing, quotes, and square plates codified the way many viewers would encounter her work for decades. Subsequent exhibitions expanded the picture of her practice, drawing from archives of prints, negatives, and notes to show how scrupulously she built each image.

Doon Arbus played a central role in shaping and protecting her mother's legacy, ensuring that reproductions remained faithful to the tonal values and framing Diane preferred. Amy Arbus became a photographer herself, continuing a family conversation about the medium that began when Diane and Allan were making fashion pictures and talking about light, gesture, and the moment of exposure. The family's stewardship, along with curatorial scholarship, has clarified the intentions and circumstances of Diane's work while resisting reductive myths about her subjects or her life.

Legacy and Influence
Diane Arbus altered the terms by which portrait photography addresses identity. Her pictures insist on the reciprocity of looking: the subject's gaze is often as probing as the camera's. She showed that the so-called margins are central to understanding a culture and that the ordinary, under scrutiny, is as mysterious as any spectacle. The square format, the use of flash, and the poised directness of her sitters established a visual lexicon now embedded in contemporary portraiture. Photographers as different as Nan Goldin, Mary Ellen Mark, and Alec Soth have acknowledged her influence, whether in their approaches to intimacy, collaborative portrait-making, or the quiet strangeness of everyday life.

As a woman working with fierce independence in a field long dominated by men, Arbus also helped expand the possibilities for authorship in photography. Her career traced a path from commercial studio work to a deeply personal, research-intensive practice aligned with the currents of postwar American art. Within that trajectory, relationships mattered: Lisette Model's teaching, John Szarkowski's advocacy, and Marvin Israel's editorial acumen met the family energies of Allan, Doon, Amy, and Howard Nemerov, all of whom shaped the conditions around her art.

Today, Arbus's photographs remain unsettling, lucid, and direct. They do not resolve tension so much as honor it, acknowledging the strangeness that runs through ordinary lives and the ordinariness that runs through lives deemed strange. In doing so, Diane Arbus gave twentieth-century photography a new ethical and aesthetic horizon, one defined by presence, permission, and the unwavering belief that every face holds a story powerful enough to meet the camera head-on.

Our collection contains 17 quotes who is written by Diane, under the main topics: Wisdom - Truth - Love - Deep - Freedom.