To ensure the ongoing availability of Diane Arbus Revelations, Aperture is proud to release this vitally important volume on the fiftieth anniversary of the posthumous 1972 Arbus retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art and the simultaneous publication of Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph.

Diane Arbus redefined the concerns and the range of the art she practiced. Her bold subject matter and photographic approach have established her preeminence in the world of the visual arts. Her gift for rendering strange those things we consider most familiar, and uncovering the familiar within the exotic, enlarges our understanding of ourselves.

Diane Arbus: Revelations affords the first opportunity to explore the origins, scope, and aspirations of what is a wholly original force in photography. Arbus’s frank treatment of her subjects and her faith in the intrinsic power of the medium have produced a body of work that is often shocking in its purity, in its steadfast celebration of things as they are. Presenting many of her lesser-known or previously unpublished photographs in the context of the iconic images reveals a subtle yet persistent view of the world.

The book reproduces two hundred full-page duotones of Diane Arbus photographs spanning her entire career, many of them never before seen. It also includes an essay, “The Question of Belief,” by Sandra S. Phillips, senior curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and “In the Darkroom,” a discussion of Arbus’s printing techniques by Neil Selkirk, the only person authorized to print her photographs since her death. A 104-page Chronology by Elisabeth Sussman, guest curator of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art show, and Doon Arbus, the artist’s eldest daughter, illustrated by more than three hundred additional images and composed mainly of previously unpublished excerpts from the artist’s letters, notebooks, and other writings, amounts to a kind of autobiography. An Afterword by Doon Arbus precedes biographical entries on the photographer’s friends and colleagues by Jeff L. Rosenheim, associate curator of photographs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. These texts help illuminate the meaning of Diane Arbus’s controversial and astonishing vision.

About the Author:

I want to photograph the considerable ceremonies of our present because we tend while living here and now to perceive only what is random and barren and formless about it. While we regret that the present is not like the past and despair of its ever becoming the future, its innumerable inscrutable habits lie in wait for their meaning...These are our symptoms and our monuments. I want simply to save them, for what is ceremonious and curious and commonplace will be legendary. Diane Arbus–born Diane Nemerov in New York City in 1923–first began taking pictures in the early 1940s following her marriage to Allan Arbus. She studied photography with Berenice Abbott, Alexey Brodovitch, and Lisette Model. Her first published photographs appeared in Esquire in 1960. Over the next ten years, her work continued to appear in Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, and other magazines.

In 1963 and 1966 she was awarded John Simon Guggenheim Fellowships. She was one of three photographers whose work was the focus of New Documents, a 1967 exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art. In 1970 Arbus made a portfolio of prints entitled A box of ten photographs, which was to be the first of a series of similar limited editions of her work. She taught photography in the late sixties at Parsons School of Design, Rhode Island School of Design, and Cooper Union, and, in 1971, gave a private master class at the artists’ cooperative where she lived.

A year after her death in 1971, her work was selected for inclusion at the Venice Biennale–the first work of an American photographer to be so honoured. The Museum of Modern Art hosted a major retrospective that travelled throughout the United States and Canada from 1972 to 1975. The three books of her work, Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (1972), Diane Arbus: Magazine Work (1984), and Untitled: Diane Arbus (1995), were published posthumously and have remained continuously in print. Diane Arbus: Revelations, in conjunction with the first major international retrospective of her work in thirty years, is the only comprehensive and intimate study of this singularly daring photographic artist.

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Другие альбомы Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (Hardcover)

Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (Paperback)

Diane Arbus: Magazine Work

Known for her evocative portraits, Diane Arbus is a pivotal figure in American postwar photography. Undeniably striking, Arbus’s black-and-white photographs capture a unique gaze. Criticized as well as lauded for her photographs of people deemed “outsiders,” Arbus continues to attract a diversity of opinions surrounding her subjects and practice. Critics and writers have described her work as “sinister” and “appalling” as well as “revelatory,” “sincere,” and “compassionate.” In the absence of Arbus’s own voice, art criticism and cultural shifts have shaped the language attributed to her work.

Organized in eleven sections that focus on major exhibitions and significant events in Arbus’s life, as well as on her practice and her subjects, the seventy facsimiles of articles and essays –– an archive by all accounts –– trace the discourse on Diane Arbus, contextualizing her hugely successful oeuvre. Also with an annotated bibliography of more than six hundred entries and a comprehensive exhibition history, Documents serves as an important resource for photographers, researchers, art historians, and art critics, in addition to students of art criticism and the interested reader alike.

In May 1971, Artforum, bastion of late modernism, featured the work of a photographer for the very first time. On its cover and in a six-page spread, it published selections from Diane Arbus's portfolio, A box of ten photographs. In the words of the magazine’s editor and photography sceptic, Philip Leider, “The portfolio changed everything . . . one could no longer deny [photography’s] status as art.” At the time of Arbus’s death, two months later, only four of the intended edition of fifty had been sold. Two had been purchased from Arbus by Richard Avedon (the first for himself, the second as a gift for his friend Mike Nichols); another was purchased by Jasper Johns; and a fourth by Bea Feitler, art director at Harper’s Bazaar. Arbus signed the prints in all four sets; each print was accompanied by an interleaving vellum slip-sheet inscribed with an extended caption. For Feitler, Arbus added an eleventh photograph, A woman with her baby monkey, N.J., 1971.

Acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., in 1986 — and the only one of the four completed and sold by Arbus that is publicly held — that portfolio is the subject of an exhibition on view at the museum from April through September 2018. This exceptional book replicates the nature of Diane Arbus’s original and now legendary object. Smithsonian curator John P. Jacob, who has unearthed a trove of new information in preparing the book and exhibition, weaves a fascinating tale of the creation, production, and continuing repercussions of this seminal work.

About the Authors:

Diane Arbus (born and died in New York, 1923–1971) is one of the towering figures of twentieth-century art. In the forty-five years since her death, her singular achievements have been celebrated by a host of major museum retrospectives throughout the world and by six posthumous publications, all of which have remained continuously in print since their publication, including Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (1972), and Diane Arbus: Revelations (Random House, 2003).

John P. Jacob is the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s McEvoy Family Curator for Photography. Previously, Jacob was vice president and director of the Inge Morath Foundation. Recent publications include Harlem Heroes: Photographs by Carl Van Vechten (2016), among others. Jacob’s research on spirit photography and the tintype, for which he received the 2012 Shpilman Award for Excellence in Photography from the Israel Museum, will be published by the museum as Ghost Stories: Found Photography and the Certification of Presence.

Untitled is the third volume of Diane Arbus’s work and the only one devoted exclusively to a single project. The photographs were taken at residences for the mentally retarded between 1969 and 1971, in the last years of Arbus’s life. Although she considered doing a book on the subject, the vast majority of these pictures remained unpublished prior to this volume. 

These photographs achieve a lyricism, an emotional purity that sets them apart from all her other accomplishments. “Finally what I’ve been searching for,” she wrote at the time. The product of her consistently unflinching regard for reality as she found it, the images in this book have less in common with the documentary than with the mythic.

Untitled may well be Arbus’s most transcendent, most romantic vision. It is a celebration of the singularity and connectedness of each and every one of us. For Diane Arbus, this is what making pictures was all about.

This is the first edition in which the image separations were created digitally; the files have been specially prepared by Robert J. Hennessey using prints by Neil Selkirk.

About the Author:

Diane Arbus (1923–1971) revolutionized the terms of the art she practised. Five volumes of her work have been published posthumously and have remained continuously in print: Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (1972), Diane Arbus: Magazine Work (1984), Untitled: Diane Arbus (1995), Diane Arbus: A Chronology (2011), and Diane Arbus Revelations (Random House, 2003).

When Diane Arbus died in 1971 at the age of 48, she was already a significant influence — even a legend — among serious photographers, although only a small number of her pictures were widely known.

The publication of Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph in 1972, and the posthumous retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, offered the public its first encounter with Arbus’s achievements. The response was unprecedented.

The monograph of eighty photographs was edited and designed by the painter Marvin Israel, Diane Arbus’s friend and colleague, and by her daughter Doon Arbus. Their goal was to remain faithful to the standards by which Arbus judged her own work, and to how she hoped it would be seen. Universally acknowledged as a timeless masterpiece, and translated into five languages, Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph remains the foundation of her international reputation.

Nearly fifty years has not diminished the impact of these pictures; they penetrate the psyche with the force of a personal encounter, and transform the way we see the world.

This is the first edition in which the image separations were created digitally; the files have been specially prepared by Robert J. Hennessey using prints by Neil Selkirk.

About the Author:

Diane Arbus (1923–1971) revolutionized the terms of the art she practiced. Five volumes of her work have been published posthumously and have remained continuously in print: Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (1972), Diane Arbus: Magazine Work (1984), Untitled: Diane Arbus (1995), Diane Arbus: A Chronology (2011), and Diane Arbus Revelations (Random House, 2003).

Другие альбомы Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus Revelations

Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (Paperback)

Diane Arbus: Magazine Work

Her disturbing pictures of emotionally and physically deformed people, freaks, and outsiders of human society opened the eye to a reality long denied and made Diane Arbus a classic of American photography.

Her monograph with 81 selected plates and original texts, posthumously published in 1972, has become a classic in itself.

When Diane Arbus died in 1971 at the age of 48, she was already a significant influence — even a legend — among serious photographers, although only a small number of her pictures were widely known.

The publication of Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph in 1972, and the posthumous retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, offered the public its first encounter with Arbus’s achievements. The response was unprecedented.

The monograph of eighty photographs was edited and designed by the painter Marvin Israel, Diane Arbus’s friend and colleague, and by her daughter Doon Arbus. Their goal was to remain faithful to the standards by which Arbus judged her own work, and to how she hoped it would be seen. Universally acknowledged as a timeless masterpiece, and translated into five languages, Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph remains the foundation of her international reputation.

Nearly fifty years has not diminished the impact of these pictures; they penetrate the psyche with the force of a personal encounter, and transform the way we see the world.

This is the first edition in which the image separations were created digitally; the files have been specially prepared by Robert J. Hennessey using prints by Neil Selkirk.

About the Author:

Diane Arbus (1923–1971) revolutionized the terms of the art she practiced. Five volumes of her work have been published posthumously and have remained continuously in print: Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (1972), Diane Arbus: Magazine Work (1984), Untitled: Diane Arbus (1995), Diane Arbus: A Chronology (2011), and Diane Arbus Revelations (Random House, 2003).

Другие альбомы Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus Revelations

Diane Arbus: Magazine Work

Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (Hardcover)

Photography's most original artist presents the celebrities of her time in a remarkable collection of portraits. This work reveals the growth of an artist who saw no artificial boundary between art and the paying job and who succeeded in putting her indelible stamp on the visual imagination.

Другие альбомы Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (Hardcover)

Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (Paperback)

Diane Arbus Revelations