Diane Arbus

Description

"The book is based on a study of unknown contact sheets from several of Arbus's portrait sessions, including more than three hundred photographs she took of a New York family one weekend in 1969. Anthony W. Lee and John Pultz engage with Arbus's claim that she was developing a "family album," and they present other images Arbus shot for Esquire magazine (including pictures of the families of Ricky Nelson, Jayne Mansfield, and Ogden Reid) and discuss her interest in photographic groupings of both traditional and alternative families. Lee and Pultz take issue with the standard interpretation of Arbus - that her interest in people outside the mainstream was somehow representative of her own emotional and social life. Instead, they reveal a photographer far more savvy with the camera, more aware of photography as an artistic and commercial practice, and more sensitive to the social and cultural tensions of the 1960s than has been acknowledged before."--Jacket.

First Sentence

A year after her photographs were introduced to a wide audience through the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibition New Documents in 1967, Diane Arbus wrote to a friend that she was at work on a book of photographs with the working title "Family Album."1

Subjects