City Gallery Wellington, New Zealand
September 2023
September 22, 2023—January 14, 2024
In 1969, Diane Arbus put together a portfolio of ten of her photographs. She selected the images, made the prints, wrote the accompanying captions on vellum sheets, and worked with artist Marvin Israel on the case that ingeniously doubles as a frame. Arbus had planned the portfolio as an edition of fifty, but when she died in 1971, she had only printed the first eight sets, and had managed to sell only four. Photographer Richard Avedon purchased two, one for himself and the second for his friend Mike Nichols, while the others went to Jasper Johns and Harper's Bazaar art director Bea Feitler.
A Box of Ten Photographs is an incredibly intimate, artist-driven project. It encapsulates Arbus’s motivations and vision for her own work and the ways it connects with the viewer and the world. In May 1971, Artforum published a cover feature with five photographs from the portfolio, the first time photography had ever been included in the magazine. A year after Arbus’s death, the entire suite of photographs was exhibited in the American pavilion at the Venice Biennale, the first time that photographs had been shown there. Arbus’s portfolio radically shifted the idea of photography and elevated its status as an artform.
This exhibition displays one of the portfolios that were printed posthumously by Neil Selkirk, at the direction of the Arbus Estate, in accordance with the original specifications. This edition is on loan from the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia. It lets us see the ten photographs that Arbus selected to represent her practice, along with the expanded descriptions she provided for them. These photographs include the iconic Identical twins, Roselle, N.J 1966 (1966) and A young Brooklyn family going for a Sunday outing, N.Y.C. 1966. The exhibition celebrates the portfolio as a project that presents Arbus’s work on her own terms, and changed photography forever.
A box of ten photographs was previously on view at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art from April 6, 2018–January 27, 2019. Learn more here.
City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi acknowledges the support of the Diane Arbus Estate; Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco; The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; and John Jacob, the McEvoy Family Curator for Photography at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, who developed this exhibition concept.
Learn more at the City Gallery Wellington.