Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus is an American artist known for her intimate portraits in black and white. First woman photographer of her generation, Arbus photographs a wide variety of characters, often those who are on the sidelines of society. Diane Nemerov on March 24, 1923 in New York, she testifies to her relationship with the city through its inhabitants. In 1965, she set up a very personal style, by adopting the close-up technique, a frontal framing. The use of the flash reveals all the expression of the face photographed and reveals details invisible to the naked eye. And above all, she chooses a strict 6 × 6 square format, which seems to imprison her models and makes it possible to burst all the strength of their presence. As if, by photographing her subjects so closely they invaded the frame of the image to the point of becoming monstrous: or as if she sought to penetrate inside the human figure. The subject, surprised, devoid of any possibility of response, is seized as it is, in all its spontaneity, its complexity, its strangeness. In 1967, its images were exposed alongside those of Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander during The exhibition New Documents at MOMA in New York, which celebrates the new points of view in documentary photography, its first big exhibition. Diane Arbus committed suicide on July 26, 1971 at the age of 48. Posthumously, she was selected as the first photographer to represent the United States at the Venice Biennial in 1972. The MET acquired the Archives of Arbus in 2007.