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Article: Where Diane Arbus went: a comprehensive retrospective prompts the author to reconsider the short yet powerfully influential career of a photographer whose "fascination with eccentricity and masquerade brought her into an unforeseeable convergence with her era, and made her one of its essential voices.".(PHOTOGRAPHY)
- Article from:
- Art in America
- Article date:
- October 1, 2005
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2005 Brant Publications, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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For almost four decades the complex, profound vision of Diane Arbus (1923-1971) has had an enormous influence on photography and a broad one beyond it, and the general fascination with her work has been accompanied by an uncommon interest in her self. Her suicide has been one, but just one, reason for the latter, yet for the most part, the events of her life were not extraordinary.
Arbus's wealthy grandparents were the founders of Russek's, a Fifth Avenue department store. Growing up well-protected in the 1930s, Arbus had only a vague sense of the effects of the Depression, and in her generation, her family became greatly cultivated (her brother was the poet ...