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Photographs from the portfolio, “A box of ten,” reveal some of the photographer’s secrets
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Dr Marcus Bunyan
Diane Arbus Xmas tree in a living room in Levittown, L. If I had to nominate one photographer who is my favourite of all time, it would be Diane Arbus. There is just something about her photographs that impinge on my consciousness, my love of difference in human beings, their subversiveness and diversity. She pictures it all, some with irony, some with love, some with outright contempt, but always with interest. Arbus was fascinated by the relationships between the psychological and the physical, probing her subjects with the camera to elicit a physical response. Her sensory, emotional, intellectual and aesthetic intelligence creates a single experience in relation to subject, stimulating her to respond to the world in her own unique way. It is unfortunate then, that this exhibition at Heide Museum of Modern Art is such a disappointment. These vintage prints are by the hand of Arbus, not later printings by other people, and as such should be as close a rendition to what Arbus intended the work to look like as can be found. Through these strategies Arbus sought to differentiate her prints from the West Coast Ansel Adams Zone system of printing which was prevalent at the time. The Zone System would have been the antithesis of what Arbus wanted from her photographs.
Diane Arbus is known for her unsettling photographic portraits of people on the outskirts of society. She also was one of the first photographers to successfully leap from the commercial sphere to the art world, at a time when critics and curators by and large did not consider photography to be an art form. She did so in part based on the strength of a portfolio she began putting together in to try to create some financial independence and to establish her artistic identity. The museum is the only venue for the portfolio, one of just four complete editions that Arbus printed and annotated. The three other editions—the artist never executed her plan to make 50—are held privately.