Photo:Diane Arbus In The Beginning
The exhibition “Diane Arbus: In The Beginning”, features more than 100 photographs that together redefine one of the most influential and provocative artists of the 20th century. This exhibition highlights never-before-seen early work of Diane Arbus, focusing on the first seven years of her career, from 1956 to 1962, the period in which she developed the idiosyncratic style and approach for which she has been recognized, praised, criticized, and copied the world over.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archive
Nearly half of the photographs that Arbus printed during her lifetime were made between 1956 and 1962, the period covered by this exhibition. At the time of her death in 1971, much of this work was stored in boxes in an inaccessible corner of her basement darkroom at 29 Charles Street in Greenwich Village. These prints remained undiscovered for several years thereafter and were not even inventoried until a decade after her death. The exhibition “Diane Arbus: In The Beginning” focuses on the seven key years that represent a crucial period of the artist’s genesis, showing Arbus as she developed her style and honed her practice. Arbus was fascinated by photography even before she received a camera in 1941 at the age of 18 as a present from her husband, Allan, and made photographs intermittently for the next 15 years while working with him as a stylist in their fashion photography business. But in 1956 she numbered a roll of 35mm film #1, as if to claim to herself that this moment would be her definitive beginning. Through the course of the next seven years (the period in which she primarily used a 35mm camera), an evolution took place, from pictures of individuals that sprang out of fortuitous chance encounters to portraits in which the chosen subjects became engaged participants, with as much stake in the outcome as the photographer. This greatly distinguishes Arbus’s practice from that of her peers, from Walker Evans and Helen Levitt to Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, who believed that the only legitimate record was one in which they, themselves, appear to play little or no role. In almost complete opposition, Arbus sought the poignancy of a direct personal encounter. Arbus made most of her photographs in New York City, where she was born and died, and where she worked in locations such as Times Square, the Lower East Side, Coney Island, and other areas. Her photographs of children and eccentrics, couples and circus performers, female impersonators and Fifth Avenue pedestrians are among the most intimate and surprising images of the era. From the beginning, Arbus believed fully that she had something special to offer the world, a glimpse of its many secrets: “I do feel I have some slight corner on something about the quality of things. I mean it’s very subtle and a little embarrassing to me but I really believe there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them”. The photographs from her early career reveal that the salient characteristics of her work , its centrality, boldness, intimacy, and apparent artlessness, were present in her pictures since the very beginning. Arbus’s creative life in photography after 1962 is well documented and already the stuff of legend; now, for the first time, we can properly examine its origins.
Info: Curator: Jeff L. Rosenheim, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Met Breuer, 2nd Floor, 945 Madison Avenue, New York, Duration: 12/7-27/11/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Sat-Sun 10:00-17:30, Thu-Fri 10:00-21:00, www.metmuseum.org
