Diane Arbus
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- 14,99 €
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- 14,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
Diane Arbus was one of the greatest photographers of the last century. Her portraiture of freaks, circus performers, twins, nudists and others on the social margins connected with a wide public at a deep psychological level. Her suicide in New York in 1971 overshadowed the reception to her work. Her posthumous exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art a year later drew lines around the block.
She was born into a Russian-Jewish family, the Nemerovs, who owned a department store on Fifth Avenue. They were family friends with the Avedons. Richard Avedon later championed Arbus’s work. Avedon rose to greater and greater commercial success through the magazine world. Arbus died in a rent-protected apartment scrambling to earn her keep with odd teaching assignments. Lubow’s biography begins at the moment Arbus quit the world of commercial photography to be an artist. She was uncompromising in that ambition. The book ends with her death. The entire narrative is a slow march towards that event.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With 12 years of scrupulous research and a critic's eye, Lubow turned a routine magazine assignment for the New York Times into the defining biography of photographer Diane Arbus, whose portraits of twins, circus freaks, and transvestites, among many others, established her as one of the leading artists of the 20th century. With few exceptions, Arbus's preferred subjects were "the obscure over the celebrated, victims of power over its agents." Lubow follows her life from her birth into an upper-class Jewish family in N.Y.C. in 1923; through her early marriage and subsequent fashion photography partnership with her husband, Allan; to the birth of their two daughters and their later divorce; and finally to her solo career with its monographs and museum exhibitions. The book explores how Arbus's lifelong depression, an incestuous relationship with her poet brother, other damaging love affairs, and ongoing financial distress may have led to her suicide at age 48. Relying primarily on interviews with friends, lovers, and colleagues, as well as Arbus's previously unavailable correspondence, Lubow provides not only a comprehensive assessment of her groundbreaking work but, perhaps more significantly, a revealing documentary of Arbus's often-tortured life. The biography's only flaw is the lack of Arbus's photos (the estate denied access); Lubow is forced to rely on wordy descriptions and exhaustive citations. But fans of her work will have no trouble calling up the iconographic portraits from their personal memory banks. And as Arbus frequently acknowledged, "The subject... is always more important than the picture."
