Diane Arbus - Diane Arbus - 1972

LEGENDARY PHOTOBOOK by highly influantial American photographer Diane Arbus:
- Andrew Roth, 101 books of books, pages 214-215
- Martin Parr, The Photobook, vol 1, page 258/259

Diane Arbus remains one of the most impressive portrait photographers who ever lived.
She photographed a wide range of subjects including strippers, carnival performers, nudists, people with dwarfism, children, mothers, couples, elderly people, and middle-class families.

MUST-HAVE-TITLE FOR EVERY AMBITIOUS PHOTOBOOK COLLECTION.

EARLY THIRD PRINTING.

This is the NEW EDITION of the VERY SUCCESSFUL SINGLE-SELLER AUCTION by 5Uhr30.com
(Ecki Heuser, Cologne, Germany).

"Diane Arbus was not a theorist but an artist. Her concern was not to buttress philosophical positions but to make pictures. She loved photography for the miracles it performs each day by accident, and respected it for the precise intentional tool that it could be, given talent, intelligence, dedication and discipline.
Her pictures challenge the basic assumptions on which most so-called documentary photography has been assumed to rest. They are concerned with private rather than social realities, with psychological rather than visual coherence, with the prototypical and mythic rather than the topical and temporal. Her real subject is no less than the unique interior lives of those she photographed."
- John Szarkowski, Director, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art -

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"Diane Arbus was born in New York Citv on March 14. 1923. She was the middle child of three and her father, David Nemerov, owned a large Fifth A venue department store called Russek's. She grew up on Central Park West and attended the Ethical Culture and Fieldston Schools. At the are of fourteen, she met Allan Arbus and they were married four years later. They became fashion photographers and, for a number of years, worked for most of the major fashion magazines in the United States. In 1959. Diane studied photography with Lisette Model who, in a sense, gave her the license to seriously pursue her own work. She received Guggenheim Fellowships in 1963 and 1966.
A year later some of the results of those projects were exhibited by John Szarkowski at The Museum of Modern Art in a show representing the works of three photographers and entitled "New Documents." For her part in this exhibit she received great acclaim. Her photographs have since been included in the permanent collections of museums throughout the United States and Europe. In 1970, she made a portfolio of ten of her photographs which was to be the first of a series of limited editions of her work. Diane Arbus committed suicide on July 26, 1971. In July 1972 she was the first American photographer to be exhibited at the Venice Biennale."
(from the publisher)

Aperture, New York. 1972. First edition, third printing.

Paperback. 232 x 278 mm. 196 pages. Photos: Diane Arbus. Layout by Doon Arbus (the daughter of Diane Arbus) and by Marvin Israel (boy-friend of Diane Arbus). Text in English.

Condition:
Book inside and outside quite fresh and clean with no previous owner marks and with no foxing; better than usual. At the top right corner of the front cover and of the pages lightly bumped (marginal, not dramatic). Overall fine condition.

After all these years still a fantastic book with some of the best photo portraits ever made.
Photobook classic in the early third printing - in better than usual condition.

"When Diane Arbus died last year, she had already become a legend and an influence among serious photographers of the younger generation. If one's natural tendency is to be skeptical about a legend, it must be said that all suspicion vanishes in the presence of the Arbus work which is extremely powerful and very strange.
In her pictures nothing is improvised or merely "caught." The subjects face the camera with interest and patience.
They are fully aware of the picture-making process. They collaborate. It is this element of participation, this suggestion of a dialogue between the subject and the photographer, that gives these pictures their great dignity. And it is their dignity that is, I think, the source of their power."
- Hilton Kramer, The New York Times -