![]() ![]() On a story about Timothy Leary, the pair stayed in his compound on a rural New York estate. The two collaborated on several magazine assignments during the ’60s, with Doon as writer and Diane as photographer. “The goal throughout,” Doon explains, “has been to ensure that each picture is seen as an entity unto itself, and not part of an external narrative, because that is what I believe in.” Diane Arbus, © The Estate of Diane Arbusĭoon’s memories of Arbus are fond. In between, international shows have included those at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2003 at the Jeu de Paume, Paris, in 2011 and The Met Breuer in New York City in 2016. The exhibition was restaged last September by David Zwirner and Fraenkel galleries at Zwirner’s West 20th Street space in New York City. The year after Arbus’s death, curator John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art mounted a major retrospective, which broke all attendance records for a one-person show at the museum. I realised I had to stop thinking about what she would have wanted It may be hard to separate the person from the pictures – but she’s not around and the pictures are, and they matter.” I realised I was going to have to stop thinking about what she would have wanted and just go ahead. “Everything that exists of her work is dependent on decisions I have made since her death. Although Arbus participated in MoMA’s groundbreaking New Documents exhibition in 1967, she never lived to stage a solo show. “But I think that clouds the fact that the work was, and in my opinion continues to be, revolutionary in its profundity.” Diane Arbus with her daughters Doon and Amy, photographed in 1956 by Allan Arbus © The Estate of Diane Arbusįor more than five decades, Doon has kept a close watch over the many exhibitions and publications that have celebrated her mother. “Some would say, and they might be right, that her suicide was a big reason for the initial brouhaha,” says Doon of the furore around Arbus’ work in the years following her death. Arbus’s portraits continue to generate fierce debate. She was by turns venerated and criticised for her vision – in the book On Photography, published in 1973, Susan Sontag questioned the limits of Arbus’s gaze, describing it as “based on distance, on privilege”. To escape, she sought out other communities, from carnival performers to the developmentally disabled, whom she photographed with both tenderness and fascination. “I wound up with this gift,” she reflects, “or this responsibility.”īorn to a wealthy family in New York, Diane Arbus described her upbringing as “like being a princess in some loathsome movie”. It fell to her eldest daughter, the writer and novelist Doon Arbus, to deal with her still-emergent work as a pioneering photographer of postwar America. ![]() When Diane Arbus died in 1971 at the age of 48, she didn’t leave a will. “I wound up with this gift”ĭoon Arbus, daughter of Diane Arbus, photographer (1923-1971). Simply sign up to the Arts myFT Digest - delivered directly to your inbox.
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