Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus photographed people the culture preferred not to look at, insisted they look back, and has been argued about ever since. She was born into the family that owned Russeks, a Fifth Avenue department store, married Allan Arbus at eighteen, and spent more than a decade as half of a successful fashion-photography partnership before walking out of it in 1956 because she could not bear it. She studied with Lisette Model, who told her to photograph what she was afraid of. What followed was made mostly with a twin-lens Rolleiflex and a flash, square, frontal, close: nudists, circus performers, transvestites, twins, giants, people in institutions, and suburban families photographed with exactly the same attention. The frontality is the argument - the subjects are posed, aware, and consenting, and the pictures refuse the documentary pretence of the unobserved. Susan Sontag attacked the work as making a spectacle of the vulnerable; others have read it as the opposite, the first serious American photography to treat such people as individuals rather than types. She had depressive episodes for years and killed herself in 1971 at forty-eight. Her posthumous retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1972 was seen by more people than any photography exhibition the museum had held. She taught at Parsons and Cooper Union and her students recorded her teaching in notes that were later published. Her estate has controlled reproduction of the work tightly, which has shaped how it can be discussed. Nicole Kidman played a fictional version of her in a 2006 film the estate refused to license the photographs to.

• Lived: 1923 CE – 1971 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: artist