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Summary
Summary
The definitive biography of the beguiling Diane Arbus, one of the most influential and important photographers of the twentieth century, a brilliant and absorbing exposition that links the extraordinary arc of her life to her iconic photographs
Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer brings into focus with vividness and immediacy one of the great American artists of the twentieth century. Arbus comes startlingly to life on these pages, a strong-minded child of disconcerting originality who grew into a formidable photographer of unflinching courage. Arbus forged an intimacy with her subjects that has inspired generations of artists. Arresting, unsettling, and poignant, her photographs stick in our minds. Why did these people fascinate her? And what was it about her that captivated them?
It is impossible to understand the transfixing power of Arbus's photographs without exploring her life. Lubow draws on exclusive interviews with Arbus's friends, lovers, and colleagues; on previously unknown letters; and on his own profound critical insights into photography to explore Arbus's unique perspective and to reveal important aspects of her life that were previously unknown or unsubstantiated. He deftly traces Arbus's development from a wealthy, sexually precocious free spirit into first, a successful New York fashion photographer and then, a singular artist who coaxed secrets from her subjects. Lubow reveals that Arbus's profound need not only to see her subjects but to be seen by them drove her to forge unusually close bonds with these people, helping her discover the fantasies, pain, and heroism within each of them, and leading her to create a new kind of photographic portraiture charged with an unnerving complicity between the subject and the viewer.
Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer brushes aside the clichés that have long surrounded Arbus and her work. It is a magnificently absorbing biography of this unique, hugely influential artist.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
With 12 years of scrupulous research and a critic's eye, Lubow turned a routine magazine assignment for the New York Times into the defining biography of photographer Diane Arbus, whose portraits of twins, circus freaks, and transvestites, among many others, established her as one of the leading artists of the 20th century. With few exceptions, Arbus's preferred subjects were "the obscure over the celebrated, victims of power over its agents." Lubow follows her life from her birth into an upper-class Jewish family in N.Y.C. in 1923; through her early marriage and subsequent fashion photography partnership with her husband, Allan; to the birth of their two daughters and their later divorce; and finally to her solo career with its monographs and museum exhibitions. The book explores how Arbus's lifelong depression, an incestuous relationship with her poet brother, other damaging love affairs, and ongoing financial distress may have led to her suicide at age 48. Relying primarily on interviews with friends, lovers, and colleagues, as well as Arbus's previously unavailable correspondence, Lubow provides not only a comprehensive assessment of her groundbreaking work but, perhaps more significantly, a revealing documentary of Arbus's often-tortured life. The biography's only flaw is the lack of Arbus's photos (the estate denied access); Lubow is forced to rely on wordy descriptions and exhaustive citations. But fans of her work will have no trouble calling up the iconographic portraits from their personal memory banks. And as Arbus frequently acknowledged, "The subject... is always more important than the picture." Agent: Elyse Cheney, Elyse Cheney Literary. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Photographer Diane Arbus (1923-1971) was addicted to danger, sex, and human oddities.Arbus left a huge legacy of prints, contact sheets, journals, appointment diaries, unpublished writings, and letters. Unfortunately, her estate does not allow researchers access to this material, nor did they authorize publication of Arbus' photographs for this biography. Nonetheless, Lubow (The Reporter Who Would Be King, 1992), who has served as a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine and a staff writer at the New Yorker, perceptively describes 164 images, providing information about where readers can find them published. Drawing on a huge number of interviews, related archives, and Arbus' several publications, the author produces a thorough, sympathetic portrait of a complicated woman who, from childhood on, stood out as "totally original." Arbus began her career as a fashion photographer with her husband, Allan Arbus. The couple did advertising work for Arbus' father, who owned a luxury department store, with Allan clicking the shutter and Diane staging the models. Soon, the couple got assignments for Glamour and Vogue, where their work was published alongside that of Irving Penn and Richard Avedon. Diane, though, was bored with fashion photography, and a course with Berenice Abbott inspired her interest in photography as an art. In 1953, with a Vogue press pass to photograph the circus, she became entranced by little people, who, writes the author, "were Diane's introduction to the sideshow freaks whose portraits became her trademark." "I do what gnaws at me," she told her teacher Lisette Model. Those subjects ranged from "unsparing portraits of the rich" to "grim and tawdry" sex scenes. After her marriage ended, Arbus intensified her "compulsive fervor" for promiscuous sex, which likely caused hepatitis. Although a critical success, she doubted her talents; Lubow chronicles the deepening depressions that led to her suicide. Despite limitations on research, Lubow sharply captures Arbus' restlessness, pain, and artistic vision. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* So enthralling and unnerving is the story of Diane Arbus and her transgressive photographs of freaks, eccentrics, the mentally disabled, transvestites, and nudists, journalist Lubow devoted a dozen years to this exacting and inclusive biography, seeking to achieve all the detail and clarity that Arbus prized in her photographs. With unprecedented access to private material, he illuminates with arresting intimacy Arbus' passionate curiosity, mischievousness, penchant for secrets and risk, haunting sense of detachment, and damaging relationships, beginning with her lifelong sexual bond with her brother, the poet laureate Howard Nemerov, through her besieged marriage, knotty friendships, and painful affairs. Lubow brings equal insight to his meticulous chronicling of Arbus' metamorphosis from a New York fashion photographer working with her husband to a lone explorer in the underworld, savoring flamboyant display and instigating erotically charged collaborations with her subjects in pursuit of photographs that told the truth. Lubow tracks Arbus closely as she studies with Lisette Model, assiduously courts her subjects, electrifies the art of photography with her darkly inquisitive series, raises two daughters, suffers financial stress and violent mood swings, and worries about the slippery ethics of her audacious and indelible portraits, driving herself to suicide at age 48 in 1971. Though lacking Arbus' photographs (which are readily available elsewhere), Lubow's portrait is the most sharply focused, encompassing, and incisive to date.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
GHETTO: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea, by Mitchell Duneier. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16.) In contemporary usage, the term "ghetto," freighted with innuendo and negative connotations, has become divorced from its historical context. The idea of a ghetto began in 1500s Venice, when the city relegated its Jews to an island; Rome and other cities in Western Europe followed suit. Duneier traces the way in which comparable forces pushed blacks to the margins in America. THE NIX, by Nathan Hill. (Vintage, $17.) Fringe politics and globecrossing capers figure into this dizzying debut novel. A young English professor with a deadend book project writes instead about his mother, a former leftist radical who abandoned him as a child. Our reviewer, Teddy Wayne, praised Hill's story as "a supersize and audacious novel of American misadventure." ALLIGATOR CANDY: A Memoir, by David Kushner. (Simon & Schuster, $16.) In 1973, when the author was 4, his older brother Jonathan was abducted and murdered; the crime rattled his Florida hometown, and a profound silence settled in his home. Years later, Kushner approached his brother's death as a reporter, digging into news clips and other records to find out more; along with his emotional account of the event itself, he offers a glimpse of the crisis wrought by grief. THE ASSISTANTS, by Camille Perri. (Putnam, $16.) Tina, the assistant to a high-powered media executive in New York, is straining under meager pay and unpaid bills. When the opportunity arises to embezzle the amount needed to pay offher student loan balance - a sum that would pale next to her boss's own spending - she takes it. But when another assistant discovers the fraud, she blackmails Tina into committing the same crime to help her pay offher own debt. DIANE ARBUS: Portrait of a Photographer, by Arthur Lubow. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $17.99.) Drawing on interviews with Arbus's friends and lovers, correspondence and diary entries, Lubow's account of the troubled artist reads like a novel. He chronicles her relatively short career, including the lurid gossip - incest, sexual escapades, mental illness - that swirled around her, while giving her own voice a prominent role in the biography. SHELTER, by Jung Yun. (Picador, $16.) Kyung, a Korean-American, grew up financially comfortable - surrounded by tutors, music lessons and other markers of success - but in loveless, unaffectionate surroundings. Years later, he is struggling to keep his middle-class home when an act of violence leaves his parents, from whom he is largely estranged, unable to remain on their own.
Library Journal Review
Many of us tend to think we already know about 20th-century figures, especially those with which our lives actually overlapped. It takes a skilled author and researcher to bring forth new insights. Diane Arbus and her images were both so simple and yet, as journalist Lubow reveals in his first book, incredibly complex. Listeners follow -Arbus (1923-71) from an unusual childhood to a suffocating marriage and then finding her true path as a photographer. Narrator Coleen Marlo has a warm and friendly voice, and her pacing is just right for a work that is packed with information. VERDICT Recommended for public libraries, particularly those with strong readership in modern arts. ["Although the book contains no images (the estate denied access), it does provide the backstory to many of her celebrated photographs, giving readers a special glimpse into how Arbus's photography has become the stuff of legend"; LJ 6/15/16 review of the Ecco: HarperCollins hc.]-Gretchen Pruett, New Braunfels P.L., TX © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Photographs Discussed in the Text | p. xiii |
| Part 1 A Daughter, a Wife, and a Mother | |
| 1 The Decisive Moment | p. 3 |
| 2 Stage-Set French | p. 7 |
| 3 Them Against the World | p. 15 |
| 4 Mysterious, but Not Blurry | p. 21 |
| 5 Enter Allan | p. 29 |
| 6 A Friendly-Looking Beard | p. 33 |
| 7 Weddings | p. 39 |
| 8 Living, Breathing Photography | p. 45 |
| 9 Floating Weightless and Brilliant | p. 51 |
| 10 Doon Is Born | p. 57 |
| 11 Mr. and Mrs. Inc. | p. 63 |
| 12 A Mystical Friendship | p. 71 |
| 13 A Long-Awaited Consummation | p. 77 |
| 14 Central Park Prophecy | p. 85 |
| Part 2 Breaking Away | |
| 15 Out the Prison Door | p. 93 |
| 16 Hermitage Seductions | p. 99 |
| 17 A Spanish Impasse | p. 107 |
| 18 Italian Street Photographer | p. 115 |
| 19 Modish and Empty | p. 123 |
| 20 Circus | p. 131 |
| 21 Out of Fashion | p. 137 |
| 22 Finding Her Spot | p. 145 |
| 23 Raincoat in Central Park | p. 151 |
| 24 A Tiny Woman with a Grand Manner | p. 157 |
| 25 What She Learned | p. 167 |
| 26 Notes of Unhappiness | p. 173 |
| 27 Losing Herself | p. 181 |
| Part 3 Becoming a Photographer | |
| 28 The Ground Was Shifting | p. 189 |
| 29 Buy Amy's Present, Go to the Morgue | p. 197 |
| 30 A Mephistopheles, a Svengali, a Rasputin | p. 207 |
| 31 A Manual of Facial Types | p. 215 |
| 32 The Weeping Clown and Fearless Tightrope Walker | p. 221 |
| 33 The Bizarre and the Chic at Bazaar | p. 231 |
| 34 Freak Show | p. 241 |
| 35 Punchy New Journalism | p. 249 |
| 36 Silver Spoon | p. 259 |
| 37 Forlorn and Angry Children | p. 265 |
| 38 Self-Created Women | p. 271 |
| 39 Tinseltown | p. 279 |
| Part 2 Knowing People in an Almost Biblical Sense | |
| 40 A Fantastically Honest Photographer | p. 289 |
| 41 Is the Jewish Couple Happy? | p. 297 |
| 42 And Then You're a Nudist | p. 303 |
| 43 It's Not Like You're Acting | p. 309 |
| 44 To Know People, Almost in a Biblical Sense | p. 317 |
| 45 An Element of Torture | p. 325 |
| 46 People on Plinths | p. 333 |
| 47 Teaching Younger People | p. 339 |
| 48 This Is the Whole Secret | p. 345 |
| 49 Mysteries of Sex | p. 351 |
| 50 I Think We Should Tell You, We're Men | p. 357 |
| 51 Nancy and Pati in Middle Age | p. 365 |
| 52 Each with a Tiny Difference | p. 373 |
| Part 5 The Crystal-Clear Vision of a Poet | |
| 53 Desperate to Be Famous | p. 381 |
| 54 Peace and Love | p. 393 |
| 55 An English Connection | p. 401 |
| 56 The Heart of the Maelstrom | p. 407 |
| 57 Fantasy Made Actual | p. 417 |
| 58 A Family on Their Lawn in Westchester | p. 421 |
| 59 A Frightful Zombie | p. 429 |
| 60 An Ideal Woman | p. 435 |
| 61 A Political Year | p. 441 |
| 62 Flatland | p. 447 |
| 63 Swinging London | p. 453 |
| Part 6 Happy Even Though they Don't Have Anything | |
| 64 Asylum | p. 465 |
| 65 Art and Money | p. 473 |
| 66 Fantastic and Real | p. 481 |
| 67 A Dowsing Rod for Anguish | p. 489 |
| 68 Wild Dynamics | p. 497 |
| 69 An Urban Palace | p. 505 |
| 70 A Modern-Day Ingres | p. 511 |
| 71 The Mexican Dwarf and the Jewish Giant | p. 517 |
| Part 7 Heartbreaking and Dizzying | |
| 72 Almost Like Ice | p. 527 |
| 73 Storms | p. 535 |
| 74 It's All Chemical | p. 541 |
| 75 Old Photographs, New Camera | p. 545 |
| 76 Blood | p. 551 |
| 77 Aging | p. 557 |
| 78 Song and Dance | p. 561 |
| 79 "Love" | p. 567 |
| 80 A Woman Passing | p. 573 |
| 81 You Can't Come In | p. 581 |
| 82 Loose Ends | p. 585 |
| 83 Like Hamlet and Medea | p. 589 |
| 84 Runes | p. 595 |
| 85 Things That Nobody Would See | p. 603 |
| Sources and Acknowledgments | p. 613 |
| Notes | p. 619 |
| Index | p. 717 |