Diane Arbus

Opening May 26, 2023

Celebrating the centenary of the birth of Diane Arbus, LUMA Arles presents Constellation, an exhibition constituting the most comprehensive presentation to date of the work of this unparalleled photographer.

Taking the form of an immersive installation, the exhibition will consist of the complete set of printer’s proofs of more than 450 images (some of them still unpublished) made by Neil Selkirk, a student of hers and the only person since the photographer’s death permitted to print from her negatives. Constellation is integral to the initial idea for LUMA Arles’ Living Archives program and as part of the LUMA Foundation / Maja Hoffmann Collection, this unique display will offer visitors a labyrinthine journey through the heart of Diane Arbus’s work, allowing them freely to discover or rediscover her images through new perspectives.

Join photographer, Neil Selkirk, and the Head of Photography Worldwide at Christie's, Darius Himes, on July 7 at the Arles Amphitheatre, and on July 8 at LUMA Arles, for a pair of conversations around "What Diane Arbus Wasn't Doing".

Learn more at LUMA Arles.

May 11–September 17, 2023

In 1956, photographer Diane Arbus (1923–1971) marked a roll of film with the number 1 and her career as an artist began. Over the next 15 years, she produced a body of work that would revolutionize not only the portrait genre, but the medium of photography more broadly. 

This exhibition, drawn from the Art Gallery of Ontario’s collection, presents the full chronological arc of Arbus’ work. From the early, intimate 35mm format prints to the sharply focused square format she embraced after 1962, these photographs allow us to trace the artist’s evolving vision as part of a changing social landscape.

Diane Arbus: Photographs, 1956-1971 is organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Learn more at Contemporary Calgary.

This video was produced on the occasion of Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited, which opened in September 2022 at our 537 West 20th Street location in New York. Organized by David Zwirner and Fraenkel Gallery to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the artist’s momentous 1972 posthumous retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Cataclysm re-creates the iconic exhibition’s checklist of 113 photographs, underscoring the subversive poignancy of Arbus’s work even today while highlighting the popular and critical upheaval the original exhibition precipitated.

Learn more about the exhibition here.

March 24–July 31, 2022

Louisiana presents the first large-scale retrospective in Scandinavia of legendary American photographer Diane Arbus (1923–1971). In a career that lasted little more than fifteen years, Arbus produced a body of work whose style and content have secured her a place as one of the most significant artists of the 20th century. The direct, even confrontational, gaze of the individuals in her photographs remains bracing to our eyes still today—provoking recognition, empathy and unease.

Arbus’s striking black and white photographs revolutionized portraiture, through their range of subjects and their style. Primarily made in and around New York City, Arbus selected her subjects—including couples, children, nudists, suburban families, circus performers, and celebrities, among others—for their singularity.

“I would like to photograph everybody,” she declared in a letter to a friend in 1960. Arbus aimed to describe, in vivid detail, a range of human difference, at a moment when visual culture strove instead to emphasize uniformity.

Highlighting her evolution as an artist over fifteen years, the exhibition Diane Arbus: Photographs, 1956–1971 features 150 photographs, drawn from the Art Gallery of Ontario’s collection and representing the full chronological arc of Arbus’s work.

From the early, intimate 35mm format prints to the sharply focused square format she embraced after 1962, these photographs allow us to trace the artist’s evolving vision as part of a changing social landscape. While early works reveal an artist gripped by the range of humanity and life as it unfolded on the street, the later works—created using a larger format—mark her emergence as a mature and compelling artist.

November 22, 2021–May 1, 2022

Cruel Radiance: Photography, 1940s–1960s focuses on extraordinary recent gifts to The Metropolitan Museum of Art—especially those made in celebration of the museum’s 150th anniversary in 2020. The show explores the flourishing of photography as a medium between World War II and the Vietnam War and includes several mini-monographic presentations on a group of diverse photographers including Diane Arbus, Helen Levitt, Roy DeCarava, Mario De Biasi, Robert Frank, Don McCullin, and Aaron Rose. The exhibition features classic photographs seldom seen, acquisitions that the museum has not yet exhibited, and magazines and books by Japanese photographers—also notable gifts to The Met and works of art in their own right. The show’s title is borrowed from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee and Walker Evans’s collaborative Depression-era masterpiece published in 1941. Agee writes about what he believed was Evans’s (and photography’s) greatest achievement and challenge: “All of consciousness is shifted from the imagined … to the effort to perceive simply the cruel radiance of what is.”

August 24–November 28, 2021

American Photography presents an overview of the development of American photography between the 1930s and the 2000s. Displaying works by thirty-three artists, including Diane Arbus and William Eggleston, the exhibition introduces the essential currents that once revolutionized the canon of classic motifs and photographic practices. The effects of this have reached far beyond the country’s borders to the present day.

The formally austere photographs of Diane Arbus depict both social outsiders and ordinary people. Whether Arbus lends visibility to the nature of her models by means of empathy and sensitivity or stages them voyeuristically as the socially “other” is the subject of an ongoing discussion. What speaks in favor of the first aspect is that Arbus was friends with some of those portrayed and depicted them over longer periods of time, but also that the protagonists were aware of the photographer’s presence and that they played to the gallery to a certain extent.

The exhibition comprises examples from the Albertina’s rich photographic holdings. Since the foundation of its Department of Photography in 1999, the Albertina has succeeded in compiling one of the most prominent collections of American photography around the globe.

Press Release

Learn more about Neil Selkirk here.

(New York, London, & Hong Kong – September 13, 2018) David Zwirner is pleased to announce its collaboration with Fraenkel Gallery in the representation of The Estate of Diane Arbus. Fraenkel Gallery’s long and close association with the Arbus Estate will continue unchanged as it works together with David Zwirner on the presentation of Arbus’s photographs in David Zwirner’s New York, London, and Hong Kong locations. The New York Times first made the announcement.

Inaugurating the collaboration will be the first complete presentation of Diane Arbus’s Untitled series, sixty-five images made at residences for the developmentally disabled between 1969 and 1971, the last years of the artist’s life. These late works are a radical departure from the bold, confrontational images upon which the photographer’s formidable reputation largely stands. They resonate with an emotional purity that sets them apart from all her other achievements. Though Arbus contemplated making a book on the subject, the majority of these images remained unknown until 1995, when Aperture published Diane Arbus: Untitled. The forthcoming exhibition at David Zwirner will include several images that have never before been seen. It opens to the public on November 2, 2018, at 537 West 20th Street, New York.   

Jeffrey Fraenkel notes, "Though Arbus’s career as a serious artist spanned only fifteen years—1956 through 1971—we are still coming to terms with her achievement, significant aspects of which remain relatively little known. Our collaboration with David Zwirner and his exceptional team will help the work to be seen and better understood especially in Europe and Asia, where there have been few or no gallery exhibitions."

David Zwirner adds, "I am honored to have been entrusted to help the Estate and Fraenkel Gallery with the extraordinary legacy of Diane Arbus, whose radical work remains as relevant today as when her photographs were taken. The Estate and Fraenkel Gallery's handling of Arbus's work has been exemplary and we are thrilled to partner with them."

Together, in March 2019, the galleries will co-present Diane Arbus/Alice Neel at The ADAA Art Show at the Park Avenue Armory, New York. This presentation will explore links and resonances between the two artists, who were simultaneously creating some of their most consequential work not far from each other in New York in the 1960s.

Fraenkel Gallery, which will celebrate its 40th anniversary in September 2019 with the book and exhibition Long Story Short, began its association with the work of Diane Arbus in 1979, the year the gallery opened. Since then, Fraenkel has presented a dozen exhibitions addressing various aspects of the artist’s achievement, including Diane Arbus: Christ in a Lobby and Other Unknown or Almost Known Works, selected by Robert Gober in 2010. In 2015 the gallery published Silent Dialogues: Diane Arbus & Howard Nemerov, by art historian Alexander Nemerov, exploring the complex web of influence between Arbus (the author’s aunt, whom he never met) and her brother, the American Poet Laureate (the author’s father).

Since opening its doors in 1993, David Zwirner has been home to innovative, singular, and pioneering exhibitions across a variety of media and genres. The gallery has helped foster the careers of some of the most influential artists working today, and has maintained long-term representation of a wide-ranging, international group of artists and estates. Based in New York with spaces in Chelsea and the Upper East Side, David Zwirner expanded to Europe in 2012 with a gallery in an eighteenth-century Georgian townhouse in London’s Mayfair district, and opened its first gallery in Asia in January 2018 in Central Hong Kong.

For all press inquiries, contact
Rebecca Herman  +1 415.981.2661 [email protected]
Julia Lukacher +1 212 727 2070 [email protected]

Image: Diane Arbus, A young man and his girlfriend with hot dogs in the park, N.Y.C. 1971. © The Estate of Diane Arbus

April 6–October 20, 2019

Highlighting the richness of the ARTIST ROOMS photography collection, which is jointly owned by National Galleries of Scotland and Tate, ARTIST ROOMS Self Evidence: Photographs by Woodman, Arbus and Mapplethorpe celebrates the work of three of the twentieth century’s most influential photographers. With a particular focus on self-portraiture and representation, the show explores the connections and similarities between these three Americans, each of whom produced bodies of work that were revolutionary, groundbreaking, and at times controversial.

Drawing from the significant holding of work by Diane Arbus within ARTIST ROOMS, the exhibition includes the artist’s limited-edition portfolio A box of ten photographs (1969–1971), which was selected by Arbus herself and as such can be seen as representing her creative expression and how she wished to be seen as a photographer. Also on view are works by Francesca Woodman, who began exploring self-identity through photography at thirteen years old and continued to experiment and develop her practice in the following decade, until her tragically early death in 1981, and a series of portraits of Robert Mapplethorpe, who explored varying personas for the camera, poignantly documenting his declining health as a result of having contracted AIDS. The exhibition occurs during the thirtieth anniversary of his death.

Diane arbus: in the beginning was a solo exhibition focusing on the first seven years of Arbus’s career, from 1956 to 1962. Organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and curated by Jeff Rosenheim, curator in charge of the museum’s Department of Photographs, the show was adapted for the Hayward Gallery in London following its initial presentation at The Met Breuer in New York in 2016.

On the occasion of the exhibition, we asked Rosenheim for his insights into the production of the show and his engagement with Arbus's practice.

When were you first introduced to Diane Arbus’s work? What was the first aspect of it you were interested to engage with as a curator?

I likely first saw Arbus’s photographs in 1972 reproduced in the publication Documentary Photography, part of the Life Library of Photography which I checked out from the local public library when I was eleven or twelve. Years later, as a young curator, I dreamed and schemed to work on any aspect of her oeuvre I could. Miraculously, one day I had the good fortune to become the custodian of her archive.

How did the opportunity to reference the artist’s archival papers and notes inform your selection of works for in the beginning?

The curatorial decision to study in depth the artist’s work from 1956 through 1962 was entirely driven by the photographs themselves, not the supporting materials, such as negatives, contact sheets, or manuscripts.    

Given that this is the first exhibition of these works, what did you feel it was most important to convey about them? Did this inform the exhibition layout, for example?

The design challenge for the exhibition was how to present these extraordinary, but mostly small-scale (6 × 9") black-and-white photographs in a way that made museum viewers slow down and discover the art on its own terms. We wanted to make sure visitors to the galleries were active, not passive. As a society, we have seem to have lost the ability to look at small things: we want big screens, moving images, and oversaturated color.

Are there specific works you would highlight among those on display as particularly important for the subsequent development of Arbus’s practice?

Arbus only worked independently with the camera for fifteen years, from 1956 until her death, in 1971. She was thirty-three when she made the first photographs in the exhibition. I believe she explored new ideas from day to day and year to year, but do not consider her early work made with a 35mm camera (and featured in the exhibition) less “developed” than her later work, made with a 2¼" square-format camera.

Seeing these works hung together as a group, were you able to make new observations about them, or connections between certain images?

No. I actually tried my best to make absolutely no direct connections between individual photographs. I took this as a conceptual design challenge and developed techniques (the narrow columns) to make sure each photograph could only be seen directly and not in comparison to any others. The exhibition was not organized by chronology, subject, or style, and there was essentially no beginning, middle, or end. Fascinating, really.

Image: Installation view, diane arbus: in the beginning, Hayward Gallery, London. Photo by Mark Blower

February 13–May 6, 2019

diane arbus: in the beginning was presented at the Hayward Gallery in London. Organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and curated by Jeff L. Rosenheim, curator in charge of the museum’s Department of Photographs, the show was adapted for the Hayward following its initial presentation at The Met Breuer in New York in 2016. A specially designed display placed each photograph on a freestanding wall, encouraging visitors to weave their own way through the works. Some fifty of these photographs have never before been shown in Europe.

Drawing largely on the Diane Arbus Archive, a trove including unpublished images, research materials, and notes gifted to the Metropolitan Museum by the artist’s daughters in 2007, more than one hundred photographs in the show brought to light the first seven years of Arbus’s career, from 1956 to 1962. Having begun taking photographs as a teenager using a camera given to her by her future husband, Allan, and later as a stylist in their fashion photography business, the start of Arbus’s artistic artistic career can be traced to 1956, when she titled a roll of 35mm film "#1." Over the following seven years, she developed a passionate, singular practice rooted in direct interaction, in contrast with the objective approach then considered prerequisite for “serious” photography. “I do feel I have some slight corner on something about the quality of things.” Arbus, who sought to establish emotional relationships with her subjects to reveal what might otherwise have remained hidden, explained: “I mean it’s very subtle and a little embarrassing to me but I really believe there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them.”

In the beginning chronicled an extremely prolific period for Arbus, during which nearly half the photographs printed during her lifetime were produced. The show was an opportunity to see lesser-known works such as Boy stepping off the curb, N.Y.C. 1957–58; The Backwards Man in his hotel room, N.Y.C. 1961; and Jack Dracula at a bar, New London, Conn. 1961. While the majority of the works came from the Diane Arbus Archive, others were drawn from private collections in the United States. Lent by London’s Victoria and Albert Museum for the exhibition, A box of ten photographs is a portfolio Arbus began working on in 1969. Printed following the artist’s death by Neil Selkirk, who speaks in this video about his meticulous work with Arbus’s oeuvre, A box of ten photographs established the foundation for Arbus’s posthumous career.

Speaking of the way in which these pictures, in hindsight, describe the foundation of Arbus’s mature practice, Holland Cotter writes in The New York Times, "she just looked and looked, and moved in closer. … She would stop people on a Lower East Side street or in a park, and talk to them, and start to shoot, capturing a wide range of postures and expressions. Back in the studio she would pick one image. Was it the true one? They were all true. She usually went with the one that conveyed the most dramatic, least absorbable sensation of difference." As such, these works anticipate the artist’s later photographs, among them the direct, enigmatic portraits of her Untitled series, made between 1969 and 1971, that was presented recently at David Zwirner.

April 6, 2018–January 27, 2019

In late 1969, Diane Arbus began to work on a portfolio. At the time of her death, in 1971, she had completed the printing for eight known sets of A box of ten photographs, of a planned edition of fifty, only four of which she sold during her lifetime. Two were purchased by the photographer Richard Avedon; another by the artist Jasper Johns. A fourth was purchased by Bea Feitler, art director at Harper’s Bazaar, for whom Arbus added an eleventh photograph.

This exhibition traces the history of A box of ten photographs between 1969 and 1973, using the set that Arbus assembled for Feitler, which was acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) in 1986. The story is a crucial one because it was the portfolio that established the foundation for Arbus’s posthumous career, ushering in photography’s acceptance to the realm of “serious” art. After his encounter with Arbus and the portfolio, Philip Leider, then editor in chief of Artforum and a photography skeptic, admitted, “With Diane Arbus, one could find oneself interested in photography or not, but one could no longer … deny its status as art.… What changed everything was the portfolio itself.”

In May 1971, Arbus was the first photographer to be featured in Artforum, which also showcased her work on its cover. In June 1972, the portfolio was sent to Venice, where Arbus was the first photographer included in a Biennale, at that time the premier international showcase for contemporary artists. SAAM organized the American contribution to the Biennale that year, thereby playing an important early role in Arbus’s legacy.