Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph: 50th Anniversary Edition

by Diane Arbus (Photographer), Doon Arbus (Editor), Marvin Israel (Editor)

Overview

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

The publication of Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph in 1972—along with the posthumous retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art—offered the general public its first encounter with the breadth and power of her achievements. The response was unprecedented. The monograph, composed of 80 photographs, was edited and designed by the painter Marvin Israel, Diane Arbus' friend and colleague, and by her daughter Doon Arbus. Their goal in producing the book was to remain as faithful as possible to the standards by which Arbus judged her own work and to the ways in which she hoped it would be seen. 

Universally acknowledged as a photobook classic, Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph is a timeless masterpiece with editions in five languages, and remains the foundation of her international reputation. A quarter of a century has done nothing to diminish the riveting impact of these pictures or the controversy they inspire. Arbus' photographs penetrate the psyche with all the force of a personal encounter and, in doing so, transform the way we see the world and the people in it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597111744
Publisher:	Aperture Foundation
Publication date:	09/30/2011
Pages:	184
Sales rank:	137,158
Product dimensions:	9.60(w) x 11.30(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Diane Arbus (1923–1971; born in New York) revolutionized the terms of the art she practiced. In addition to Diane Arbus: Revelations, four other volumes of her work have been published posthumously and have remained continuously in print: Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (1972), Untitled: Diane Arbus (1995), Diane Arbus: A Chronology (2011), and Diane Arbus: A box of 10 photographs (2018, with Smithsonian American Art Museum).

Doon Arbus is the eldest daughter of Diane and Allan Arbus; since her mother’s death she has managed the Estate of Diane Arbus.

Marvin Israel was an American artist, photographer, painter, teacher, and art director from New York, known for modern and surreal interiors, and abstract imagery.

Editorial Reviews

Diane Arbus was not a theorist but an artist. Her concern was not to buttress philosophical positions but to make pictures. She loved photography for the miracles it performs every day by accident, and respected it for the precise intentional tool that it could be, given talent, intelligence, dedication and discipline. Her pictures are concerned with private rather than social realities, with psychological rather than visual coherence, with the prototypical and mythic rather than the topical and temporal. Her real subject is no less than the unique interior lives of those she photographed. –John Szarkowski, 1972, Director, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art

Those portraits of sideshow performers and weeping children, her matter-of-fact nudists and naked transvestites, her pictures of "them," her pictures of "us"—something of consequence is at stake here, and it's not just art. Arbus worked at the point where the voyeuristic and the sacramental converge. She lies in wait for your first misstep in her direction. Then she dares you to stare at something—a little boy with a toy hand grenade, a dominatrix embracing her client—until you admit your own complicity with whatever it is in there that frightens you. At that point, all the picture's traps unfold, and it confers its rough grace. –Richard Lacayo, Time

Confronting a major photograph by Arbus, you lose your ability to know—or distinctly to think or feel, and certainly to judge—anything. She turned picture-making inside out. She didn’t gaze at her subjects; she induced them to gaze at her. Selected for their powers of strangeness and confidence, they burst through the camera lens with a presence so intense that whatever attitude she or you or anyone might take toward them disintegrates…You may feel, crazily, that you have never really seen a photograph before. –Peter Schjeldahl The New Yorker

From the Publisher

"The photographs were taken at residences for the mentally retarded between 1966 and 1971, places she kept going back to every few months or so, to picnics, dances, on Halloween," writes Arbus's daughter in the short afterword here. "This is simply information. What is in the pictures lies closer to home." In fact, what is revealed on page after page hits almost too close to home. Best known for her documentary yet wholly empathetic photographs of the human oddities from which polite society averts its gaze, Arbus reached the limits of the medium's possibilities for both truth-telling and identification in this series made in the years and months before her suicide. In those times, anyone choosing the severely handicapped as subject matter would risk accusations of exploitation, but this collection is immune: not simply because the subjects are clearly willing participants, giddily posing for the rare opportunity, but also because the product utterly lacks a voyeuristic dimension. There is no visible attempt to compose an art or to layer the images with the artist's interpretation. These are simply some of the most disturbingly honest photographs ever taken. Essential for all photography collections.-Eric Bryant, "Library Journal"

Library Journal

This 25th anniversary edition celebrates one of the legends of modern photography, who died a suicide in 1971, and one of its seminal books<-->in conjunction with the 1972 posthumous retrospective of her work at the Museum of Modern Art. The new reproductions of 80 b&w photographs of everyday scenes and individuals on the fringes of society (circus people, men in drag, the disabled) still evoke controversy and wonder. The text was compiled from Arbus' writings, interviews, and other sources. No index. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Booknews

In an afterword to this remarkable gathering of her mother's photographs, Doon Arbus insists that the intent of these works "wasn't . . . about who or what she saw, but about the experience of seeing it and the power of her photographs to make that experience visible." Between 1969 and 1971, Diane Arbus focused her lens on residents in homes for the mentally retarded. Her patient eye searches out the individual in an isolated space and time, for instance, a little girl who squeezes a Styrofoam cup in her hands while holding under her arm a shoe box bearing the brand name "Child Life," providing ironic contrast with her face, which looks, somehow, too old. Doon Arbus writes that her mother's photographs remind "us that facts lie at the root of what we're looking at," yet it takes us a moment to realize or even come to terms with those facts. These haunting images, jarring yet magical, arrive from the past to give a lyrical poke at our collective subconscious, to wake us up--and remind us to look.

Raul Nino

Everything that needs to be said has already been said about this book, this record, this heartache, this brave account, this body of evidence. I didn't choose to write about this book because I feel that I can say anything more eloquent than what has already been said... Arbus is able to tell us how much we want and how much we will have and will not have, she manage it in the pages of one monograph.

The Photobook Review - Laurel Nakadate