The photographic appointments #39 : Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus, born Diane Nemerov 1923 - 1971, is a American street photographer. She's known for working with a 6x6 two-lens reflex camera equipped with a high power magnesium-flash. She also realized a project on a community of mentally handicapped people.
She then studied photography at the New School for Social Research in New York with Marvin Israel and Richard Avedon. Diane Arbus is part of a photographic trend inaugurated by another great American photographer, Walker Evans, who imposed a documentary and urban style in the 1930s. But it was after 1962, when she abandoned the rectangular format of the 24x36 for the square format of the 6x6, with a Mamiya C330 equipped with a high-power magnesium flash torch (of the type Press 25 producing one million lumens) permanently fixed and used systematically including in daylight it imposes its own style.
Mamiya C330 with a handle, replaced by a flashlight torch in the case of Diane Arbus.
In 1963, she obtained a grant from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, which enabled her to carry out a remarkable work entitled American Rites, Manners and Customs, a vast gallery of portraits of Americans, for the mostly unknown, which highlights the social rites of this society.
Diane Arbus concentrates her activity in New York and its surroundings, photographing strangers in the street. Fascinated by non-standard characters, she also photographed transvestites, transgender people, the mentally handicapped, twins, dwarfs, etc.
In 1966, she contracted hepatitis as a result of her very intimate working method which often led her to have sex with her models. This event marks the beginning of his slow march towards suicide.
By mixing the familiar with the bizarre, Diane Arbus draws a troubling portrait of America in the 1960s. She nevertheless tries to show that these strange and atypical characters, usually considered as fair phenomena, are before all real beings, with habits and a daily routine.
Depressive, she kills herself at age 48 on July 26, 1971 in Greenwich Village by swallowing a significant amount of barbiturates and then opening the veins in her bathtub. His short career lasted only 8 years.
His influence on American photography is considerable. It has helped to impose the idea that photography is an art in its own right. She worked in black and white and developed herself in order to completely master the result of her works.
Diane Arbus is the mother of journalist and writer Doon Arbus (born 1945) and photojournalist Amy Arbus (born 1954). She is the sister of the poet Howard Nemerov.

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