Diane Arbus

Career Arbus received her first camera, a Graflex, from Allan shortly after they married. In the early 1940s, Diane's father employed Diane and Allan to take photographs for the department store's advertisements. Despite over 200 pages of their fashion editorial in Glamour, and over 80 pages in Vogue, the Arbuses' fashion photography has been described as of "middling quality". Edward Steichen's noted 1955 photography exhibition, The Family of Man, did include a photograph by the Arbuses of a father and son reading a newspaper. However, it was her studies with Lisette Model, which began in 1956, that encouraged Arbus to focus exclusively on her own work. (Her last known negative was labeled #7459.) Arbus also credits Model with making it clear to her that "the more specific you are, the more general it'll be." A few years later, in 1958 she began making lists of who and what she was interested in photographing. She began photographing on assignment for magazines such as Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, and The Sunday Times Magazine in 1959. In 1964, Arbus began using a 2-1/4 Mamiyaflex camera with flash in addition to the Rolleiflex. Her methods included establishing a strong personal relationship with her subjects and re-photographing some of them over many years. "During her lifetime, there was no market for collecting photographs as works of art, and her prints usually sold for $100 or less."

Throughout the 1960s, Arbus supported herself largely by taking magazine assignments and commissions. For example, in 1968 she shot documentary photographs of poor sharecroppers in rural South Carolina (for Esquire magazine). In 1969 a rich and prominent actor and theater owner, Konrad Matthaei, and his wife, Gay, commissioned Arbus to photograph a family Christmas gathering. During her career, Arbus photographed Mae West, Ozzie Nelson and Harriet Nelson, Bennett Cerf, atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair, Norman Mailer, Jayne Mansfield, Eugene McCarthy, billionaire H. L. Hunt, Gloria Vanderbilt's baby Anderson Cooper, Coretta Scott King, and Marguerite Oswald (Lee Harvey Oswald's mother). Szarkowski hired Arbus in 1970 to research an exhibition on photojournalism called "From the Picture Press"; it included many photographs by Weegee whose work Arbus admired. She also taught photography at the Parsons School of Design and the Cooper Union in New York City, and the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island.

Late in her career, the Metropolitan Museum of Art indicated to her that they would buy three of her photographs for $75 each, but citing a lack of funds, purchased only two. As she wrote to Allan Arbus, "So I guess being poor is no disgrace." Arbus returned to several facilities repeatedly for Halloween parties, picnics, and dances. In a letter to Allan Arbus dated November 28, 1969, she described these photographs as "lyric and tender and pretty". After his encounter with Arbus and the portfolio, Philip Leider, then editor in chief of Artforum and a photography skeptic, admitted, "With Diane Arbus, one could find oneself interested in photography or not, but one could no longer . . . deny its status as art." She was the first photographer to be featured in Artforum and "Leider's admission of Arbus into this critical bastion of late modernism was instrumental in shifting the perception of photography and ushering its acceptance into the realm of 'serious' art." New Documents (1967) alongside the work of Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, curated by John Szarkowski. New Documents, which drew almost 250,000 visitors demonstrated Arbus's interest in what Szarkowski referred to as society's "frailties" The show was polarizing, receiving both praise and criticism, with some identifying Arbus as a disinterested voyeur and others praising her for her evident empathy with her subjects. as part of the Overlooked history project. The Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) housed an exclusive exhibit from April 6, 2018, to January 27, 2019, that featured one of Arbus's portfolios, A box of ten photographs. The SAAM is the only museum currently displaying the work. The collection is "one of just four complete editions that Arbus printed and annotated. The three other editions—the artist never executed her plan to make 50—are held privately". The Smithsonian edition was made for Bea Feitler, an art director who both employed and befriended Arbus. After Feitler's death, Baltimore collector G. H. Dalsheimer bought her portfolio from Sotheby's in 1982 for $42,900. The SAAM then bought it from Dalsheimer in 1986. The portfolio was put away in the museum's collection, until 2018. Their daughter Doon, who would become a writer, was born in 1945; their daughter Amy, who would become a photographer, was born in 1954.

Arbus and her husband separated in 1959, although they maintained a close friendship. The couple also continued to share a darkroom, After Diane’s death, Allan became well-known for his role as Dr. Sidney Freedman, a United States Army psychiatrist, on the television show M*A*S*H. Marvin Israel both spurred Arbus creatively and championed her work, encouraging her to create her first portfolio. Richard Avedon was among the photographers and artists Arbus befriended; he was approximately the same age, his family had also run a Fifth Avenue department store, and many of his photographs were also characterized by detailed frontal poses.

Death Arbus experienced "depressive episodes" during her life, similar to those experienced by her mother; the episodes may have been made worse by symptoms of hepatitis.

On July 26, 1971, while living at Westbeth Artists Community in New York City, Arbus died by suicide by ingesting barbiturates and cutting her wrists with a razor. She has been called "a seminal figure in modern-day photography and an influence on three generations of photographers"

When the film The Shining, directed by Stanley Kubrick, was released to cinemas worldwide in 1980 and became hugely successful, millions of moviegoers experienced Diane Arbus's legacy without realizing it. The movie's recurring characters of identical twin girls who are wearing identical dresses appear on-screen as a result of a suggestion Kubrick received from crew member Leon Vitali. He is described by film historian Nick Chen as "Kubrick's right-hand man from the mid-70s onwards". Chen goes on to reveal, "Not only did Vitali videotape and interview 5,000 kids to find [the right child actor to portray] Jack Nicholson's [character's] son, Danny, he was also responsible for discovering the creepy twin sisters on the final day of auditions. The pair, in fact, weren't twins in Kubrick's script, and it was Vitali who immediately suggested Diane Arbus's infamous photo of identical twin sisters as a point of reference." On the other hand, it is common institutional practice in the U.S. to include only a handful of images for media use in an exhibition press kit. The estate was also criticized in 2008 for minimizing Arbus's early commercial work, although those photographs were taken by Allan Arbus and credited to the Diane and Allan Arbus Studio.

In 1972, Arbus was the first photographer to be included in the Venice Biennale; her photographs were described as "the overwhelming sensation of the American Pavilion" and "an extraordinary achievement".

The Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective curated by John Szarkowski of Arbus's work in late 1972 that subsequently traveled around the United States and Canada through 1975; it was estimated that over seven million people saw the exhibition.

In 2001–04, Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph was selected as one of the most important photobooks in history.

Neil Selkirk, a former student, began printing for the 1972 MOMA retrospective and Aperture Monograph.

A half-hour documentary film about Arbus's life and work known as Masters of Photography: Diane Arbus or Going Where I've Never Been: The Photography of Diane Arbus was produced in 1972 and released on video in 1989. The voiceover was drawn from recordings made of Arbus's photography class by Ikkō Narahara and voiced by Mariclare Costello, who was Arbus's friend and the wife of her ex-husband Allan.

Patricia Bosworth wrote an unauthorized biography of Arbus published in 1984. Bosworth reportedly "received no help from Arbus's daughters, or from their father, or from two of her closest and most prescient friends, Avedon and ... Marvin Israel".

Between 2003 and 2006, Arbus and her work were the subject of another major traveling exhibition, Diane Arbus Revelations, which was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; among the venues was the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Accompanied by a book of the same name, the exhibition included artifacts such as correspondence, books, and cameras as well as 180 photographs by Arbus. Because Arbus's estate approved the exhibition and book, the chronology in the book is "effectively the first authorized biography of the photographer".

The Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased twenty of Arbus's photographs (valued at millions of dollars) and received Arbus's archives, which included hundreds of early and unique photographs, and negatives and contact prints of 7,500 rolls of film, as a gift from her estate in 2007.

In 2018, The New York Times published a belated obituary of Arbus

On 11 August 2025, the main belt asteroid was named in her honor.

Critical reception In a 1967 review of MoMA's New Documents exhibition, which featured the work of Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand, Max Kozloff wrote, "What these photographers have in common is a complete loss of faith in the mass media as vehicle, or even market for their work. Newsiness, from the journalistic point of view, and 'stories', from the literary one, in any event, do not interest them .... Arbus' refusal to be compassionate, her revulsion against moral judgment, lends her work an extraordinary ethical conviction." Writing for Arts Magazine, Marion Magid stated, "Because of its emphasis on the hidden and the eccentric, this exhibit has, first of all, the perpetual, if criminal, allure of a sideshow. One begins by simply craving to look at the forbidden things one has been told all one's life not to stare at ... One does not look at such subjects with impunity, as anyone knows who has ever stared at the sleeping face of a familiar person, and discovered its strangeness. Once having looked and not looked away, we are implicated. When we have met the gaze of a midget or a female impersonator, a transaction takes place between the photograph and the viewer; in a kind of healing process, we are cured of our criminal urgency by having dared to look. The picture forgives us, as it were, for looking. In the end, the great humanity of Diane Arbus' art is to sanctify that privacy which she seems at first to have violated." Susan Sontag wrote an essay in 1973 entitled "Freak Show" that was critical of Arbus's work; it was reprinted in her 1977 book On Photography as "America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly". Sontag's essay itself has been criticized as "an exercise in aesthetic insensibility" and "exemplary for its shallowness". Judith Goldman in 1974 posited that, "Arbus' camera reflected her own desperateness in the same way that the observer looks at the picture and then back at himself." David Pagel's 1992 review of the Untitled series states, "These rarely seen photographs are some of the most hauntingly compassionate images made with a camera .... The range of expressions Arbus has captured is remarkable in its startling shifts from carefree glee to utter trepidation, ecstatic self-abandonment to shy withdrawal, and simple boredom to neighborly love. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of her photographs is the way they combine sentiments we all share with experiences we can imagine but never know." Hilton Als reviewed Untitled in 1995 for The New Yorker, saying, "The extraordinary power of Untitled confirms our earliest impression of Arbus's work; namely, that it is as iconographic as it gets in any medium." In her review of the traveling exhibition Diane Arbus Revelations, Francine Prose writes, "Even as we grow more restive with conventional religion, with the intolerance and even brutality it so frequently exacts in trade for meaning and consolation, Arbus's work can seem like the bible of a faith to which one can almost imagine subscribing—the temple of the individual and irreducible human soul, the church of obsessive fascination and compassion for those fellow mortals whom, on the basis of mere surface impressions, we thoughtlessly misidentify as the wretched of the earth." Barbara O'Brien in a 2004 review of the exhibition Diane Arbus: Family Albums found her and August Sander's work "filled with life and energy." Peter Schjeldahl, in a 2005 review of the exhibition Diane Arbus Revelations for The New Yorker stated, "She turned picture-making inside out. She didn't gaze at her subjects; she induced them to gaze at her. Selected for their powers of strangeness and confidence, they burst through the camera lens with a presence so intense that whatever attitude she or you or anyone might take toward them disintegrates .... You may feel, crazily, that you have never really seen a photograph before. Nor is this impression of novelty evanescent. Over the years, Arbuses that I once found devastating have seemed to wait for me to change just a little, then to devastate me all over again. No other photographer has been more controversial. Her greatness, a fact of experience, remains imperfectly understood." Leo Rubinfien wrote in 2005, "No photographer makes viewers feel more strongly that they are being directly addressed ... When her work is at its most august, Arbus sees through her subject's pretensions, her subject sees that she sees, and an intricate parley occurs around what the subject wants to show and wants to conceal ... She loved conundrum, contradiction, riddle, and this, as much as the pain in her work, puts it near Kafka's and Beckett's ... I doubt anyone in the modern arts, not Kafka, not Beckett, has strung such a long, delicate thread between laughter and tears." In a 2013 interview for the Los Angeles Review of Books he also said, "She's finding little pockets of jubilation that are framed within each photograph. The obvious meaning of the photograph is abjection, but the obtuse meaning is jubilation, beauty, staunchness, pattern." Mark Feeney's 2016 The Boston Globe review of in the beginning at the Met Breuer states, "It's not so much that Arbus changed how we see the world as how we allow ourselves to see it. Underbelly and id are no less part of society for being less visible. Outcasts and outsiders become their own norm – and with Arbus as ambassador, ours, too. She witnesses without ever judging." In a 2018 review for The New York Times on Diane Arbus's Untitled series, Arthur Lubow writes, "The 'Untitled' photographs evoke paintings by Ensor, Bruegel and especially the covens and rituals conjured up by Goya ... In the almost half century that has elapsed since Arbus made the 'Untitled' pictures, photographers have increasingly adopted a practice of constructing the scenes they shoot and altering the pictures with digital technology in an effort to bring to light the visions in their heads. The 'Untitled' series, one of the towering achievements of American art, reminds us that nothing can surpass the strange beauty of reality if a photographer knows where to look. And how to look."

Some of Arbus's subjects and their relatives have commented on their experience being photographed by Diane Arbus: The father of the twins pictured in "Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J. 1967" said, "We thought it was the worst likeness of the twins we'd ever seen. I mean it resembles them, but we've always been baffled that she made them look ghostly. None of the other pictures we have of them looks anything like this." Norman Mailer said, in 1971, "Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child." Mailer was reportedly displeased with the well-known "spread-legged" New York Times Book Review photo. Arbus photographed him in 1963. Colin Wood, the subject of Child With a Toy Grenade in Central Park, said, "She saw in me the frustration, the anger at my surroundings, the kid wanting to explode but can't because he's constrained by his background."

Publications Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph. Edited by Doon Arbus and Marvin Israel. Accompanied an exhibition at Museum of Modern Art, New York. New York: Aperture, 1972. . New York: Aperture, 1997. . Fortieth-anniversary edition. New York: Aperture, 2011. (hardback); (paperback). Diane Arbus: Magazine Work. Edited by Doon Arbus and Marvin Israel. With texts by Diane Arbus and an essay by Thomas W. Southall. New York: Aperture, 1984. . London: Bloomsbury, 1992. . Untitled. Edited by Doon Arbus and Yolanda Cuomo. New York: Aperture, 1995. . New York: Aperture, 2011. . Diane Arbus: Revelations. New York: Random House, 2003. . Includes essays by Sandra S. Phillips ("The question of belief") and Neil Selkirk ("In the darkroom"); a chronology by Elisabeth Sussman and Doon Arbus including text by Diane Arbus; afterword by Doon Arbus; and biographies of fifty five of Arbus's friends and colleagues by Jeff L. Rosenheim. Accompanied an exhibition that premièred at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Diane Arbus: A Chronology, 1923–1971. New York: Aperture, 2011. . By Elisabeth Sussman and Doon Arbus. Contains the chronology and biographies from Diane Arbus: Revelations. Silent Dialogues: Diane Arbus & Howard Nemerov. San Francisco: Fraenkel Gallery, 2015. . By Alexander Nemerov. diane arbus: in the beginning. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016. . By Jeff L. Rosenheim. Accompanied an exhibition that premiered at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Diane Arbus: A box of ten photographs. New York: Aperture, 2018. . By John P. Jacob. Accompanied an exhibition that premiered at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Diane Arbus Revelations. New York: Aperture, 2022. .

Notable photographs Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C. 1962 (1962)

Arbus's most well-known photographs include: Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C. 1962 – Colin Wood, with the left strap of his jumper awkwardly hanging off his shoulder, tensely holds his long, thin arms by his side. Clenching a toy grenade in his right hand and holding his left hand in a claw-like gesture, his facial expression is one of consternation. The contact sheet demonstrates that Arbus made an editorial choice in selecting which image to print. A print of this photograph was sold in 2015 at auction for $785,000, an auction record for Arbus. Teenage Couple on Hudson Street, N.Y.C., 1963 – Wearing long coats and "worldlywise expressions", two adolescents appear older than their ages. Triplets in Their Bedroom, N.J. 1963 – Three girls sit at the head of a bed. A Young Man in Curlers at Home on West 20th Street, N.Y.C. 1966 – A close-up shows the man's pock-marked face with plucked eyebrows, and his hand with long fingernails holds a cigarette. Early reactions to the photograph were strong; for example, someone spat on it in 1967 at the Museum of Modern Art. Boy With a Straw Hat Waiting to March in a Pro-War Parade, N.Y.C. 1967 – With an American flag at his side, he wears a bow tie, a pin in the shape of a bow tie with an American flag motif, and two round button badges: "Bomb Hanoi" and "God Bless America / Support Our Boys in Viet Nam". The image may cause the viewer to feel both different from the boy and sympathetic toward him. Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J. 1967 – Young twin sisters Cathleen and Colleen Wade A Family on Their Lawn One Sunday in Westchester, N.Y. 1968 – A woman and a man sunbathe while a boy bends over a small plastic wading pool behind them. In 1972, Neil Selkirk was put in charge of producing an exhibition print of this image when Marvin Israel advised him to make the background trees appear "like a theatrical backdrop that might at any moment roll forward across the lawn.". A Naked Man Being a Woman, N.Y.C. 1968 – The subject has been described as in a "Venus-on-the-half-shell pose" The photograph motivated Carmel's cousin to narrate a 1999 audio documentary about him. A print was sold at auction for $583,500 in 2017.

In addition, Arbus's A box of ten photographs was a portfolio of selected 1963–1970 photographs in a clear Plexiglas box/frame that was designed by Marvin Israel and was to have been issued in a limited edition of 50. However, Arbus completed only eight boxes

Solo exhibitions 1967: New Documents. Museum of Modern Art, New York. 1972: Diane Arbus Portfolio: 10 Photos. Venice Biennale. Fraenkel Gallery, New York. 1992: Diane Arbus: The Untitled Series, 1970–1971. Jan Kesner Gallery, Los Angeles. 1995: The Movies: Photographs from 1956 to 1958. Robert Miller Gallery, New York. 1997: Diane Arbus: Women. Galleria Photology, London. 2003–2006: Diane Arbus: Revelations. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; CaixaForum, Barcelona; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. 2005: Diane Arbus: Other Faces Other Rooms. Robert Miller Gallery, New York. 2008–2009: Diane Arbus, a Printed Retrospective, 1960–1971. Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; and Centre Régional de la Photographie Nord Pas-de-Calais, Douchy-les-Mines, France. 2009: Diane Arbus. Timothy Taylor Gallery, London. 2009–2018: Artist Rooms: Diane Arbus. National Museum Cardiff, Wales; and Dean Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; Nottingham Contemporary; Aberdeen Art Gallery; Tate Modern, London; Kirkcaldy Galleries; The Burton at Bideford. Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; FOAM, Amsterdam. Fotomuseum, Winterthur; Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; and Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam. 2016–2017: diane arbus: in the beginning. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Malba, Buenos Aires, Argentina. 2018: Diane Arbus Untitled, David Zwirner Gallery, New York. 2019: Diane Arbus: In the Beginning, Hayward Gallery, London. 2020: Diane Arbus: Photographs, 1956–1971, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. 2025: Diane Arbus Constellation at New York's Park Avenue Armory, promoted as the artist's "largest ever" retrospective, featuring 454 Arbus prints by Neil Selkirk. Selkirk is the only person authorized to make prints from her negatives.

Collections Arbus's work is held in the following permanent collections: