Diane Arbus
American Photographer
Summary of Diane Arbus
Diane Arbus is an American photographer known for her hand-held black and white images of marginalized people such as midgets, circus freaks, giants, gender non-conforming people, as well as more normalized subjects of suburban families, celebrities, and nudists. Arbus' work can be understood as bizarre, fantastical, and psychologically complex all at once - either way, she took documentary photography a step further. One might feel as though they are violating a social contract with the subject for it often evokes a sense of "othering" through the intense gaze her photography offers. Through Arbus, humans (even the most mundane and neutral) become visual spectacles. Arbus became internationally known for her provocative imagery, and remains one of the most unique Post-Modern American photographers. Although she is often criticized for objectifying her subjects, the power of her images remains.
Accomplishments
- Arbus employed the techniques of documentary or photojournalistic photography to represent real life subjects in their natural environments. However, she made the resulting works uniquely her own, as her personal journey was always embedded in the imagery she photographed. There is a multiplicity of the subject, for you can't think of the image without thinking of the set of qualities that made the image possible; which is to say, it is difficult to imagine the photograph taking place without the thought of Arbus present.
- Arbus found intrigue and conjured beauty in unlikely subjects, and made remarkable portraits of people that were not often deemed "fit" to be in front of the lens of a camera. She sought out unique characters on the fringes of society for her work, and said to this, "I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them." This went a long way from the art that is often thought to be reserved only for the aesthetically pleasing, as opposed to showing the "real" or "true" world.
- The idea of personal identity as socially constructed is one that Arbus came back to, whether it be performers, women and men wearing makeup, or a literal mask obstructing one's face. Critics have speculated that the choices in her subjects were a reflection of her own identity issues, for she said that the only thing she suffered from as a child was never having felt adversity. This evolved into a longing for things that money couldn't buy such as experiences in the underground social world. She is often praised for her sympathy for these subjects, a quality which is not immediately understood through the images themselves, but through her writing and the testimonies of the men and women she portrayed.
Progression of Art
42nd Street movie theater audience, N.Y.C. 1958
Photographing movie theaters and audiences kicked-off Arbus's initial fascination with photography. In this early photo, Arbus captures a number of hunched-over bodies siting underneath a flared projector light. This photograph reveals the complicated social process of taking pictures and Arbus's humble beginnings as a timorous photographer. The grainy film constructs a dreamlike image of minute dots accentuating the dusty light. Arbus admired the textured look, "I'd be fascinated by what the grain did because it would make a kind of tapestry of all these little dots and everything would be translated into this medium of dots..." The grainy print attests to her amateur technical skills that she improved with the help of Allan Arbus. The photo flips the script, capturing the gaze of the audience lost in a collective stare towards the movie screen. As Arbus wrote "It always seemed to me that photography tends to deal with facts whereas film tends to deal with fiction."
She started her photography career shy and avoiding actual human interaction and chose pre-constructed scenes like wax museums or unbeknownst audiences such as this image. She would often wait for the opportune moment in parks and city sidewalks, often photographing people from behind or without their consent or knowledge. She obliged the grip of the photographic excellence as the search for the perfect moment became dire. She gave up shooting movie theaters when she changed from her 35mm camera to a more professional, albeit bulkier, medium format camera. Shortly after this image was taken she started using a 2 ? inch twin-lens reflex Rolleiflex, then later a Mamiya C33, which are harder to use with discretion. The medium format camera produces a square negative, which came to be one of Arbus' compositional signatures. Shortly after this image was taken her distinctive style began to take shape as she took more risks and found out how to relate to people she sought to capture.
Gelatin silver print - Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Miss Venice Beach, Cal
Photographing as a spectator in a crowd of (mostly) male onlookers, Arbus successfully exposes the voyeuristic male gaze projected onto the contestants' bodies. Instead of exclusively focusing on the parading females in their bathing suits, she captures the audience as well as the women. Through framing, she transforms the subject of the image from the pageant itself, to the wider idea of pageantry following the theme of voyeurism in her work.
Arbus engages with the event with a critical lens into the otherwise superficial meaning of ceremonies that make up our everyday existence. Her portrayal of judgment requires of us to ask ourselves if there is any one true meaning of the conventions of physical female beauty. Arbus wrote, "It took about ten hours of interviews, sashaying, and performing what they called their talent and the poor girls looked so exhausted by the effort to be themselves that they continually made the fatal mistakes which were in fact themselves..."
Her photo crystallized the moral issues traditionally plaguing women in American society: objectification through the male gaze. This topic was addressed with both sexes by Arbus. Analysis of this photograph is similar to her portraits of drag queens, burlesque performers, strippers, cross dressers, and some would argue even the hyper-masculine body builders. What all of the images have in common, is the portrayal of the subjects within understanding of the man's point of view.
Gelatin Silver Print - The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C
Instead of presenting the young boy as playful and angelic, this boy is captured in a tense moment of frustration and confusion. His wiry limbs and clenched teeth promote the idea of a young boy filled with rage and nerves. His right hand tightly clamps a toy grenade - that looks very real - while his left hand looks like a claw. Completely alone, the empty space exemplifies the boy's isolation from others. Balancing his edgy nature, Arbus carefully positioned him at a bend in the path where a tree acts as a visual line from his legs. The setting in Central Park adds an element of innocence aided by the idyllic-looking family in the background.
Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C is considered to be one of the most important and influential images of the 20th-century's art and post-modernist art theory. Nothing is medically wrong with the boy, but his momentary reaction to the event of being photographed has come to exemplify more than a portrait. The child embodies awkward tensions between childhood games, not-so-childlike violence, and greater sociopolitical turmoil that defined the late 1960s and early 1970s, a time when the county was at war. While her contact sheet shows her subject, Colin Wood, modeled in various "typical" child-like poses of smiling and hamming it up for the camera; she chose to print the most unusual shot of Wood.
This image is often criticized as being disturbing to viewers. Arbus sought to expose the underbelly of society, which is often overlooked or ignored. What becomes apparent is the more insistent, larger narrative of American sensibility, lost in the social upheavals of the 1960s. Critic Susan Sontag wrote about Arbus' aesthetic insensibilities in her book, On Photography, which is a very influential piece of critique questioning the legitimacy of photography as an art form, written in 1977. She categorized Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C, among Arbus' work as a whole, as picturing people who are "pathetic, pitiable, as well as repulsive." This image remains an icon despite Sontag's scathing review, and has continued to grow in fame as the visual impact of the image is haunting and timeless.
Gelatin Silver Print - The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, New York City, New York
Puerto Rican woman with a beauty mark
In this tightly cropped portrait of a middle-aged woman, Arbus alludes to the highly nuanced idea that identity is constructed. The subject has thick dark hair contained by a sheer headscarf; her heavy eye makeup and lipstick accentuate her features, as she stares just beyond the camera lens, with a half-cocked grimace. Despite her efforts to beautify herself, her lip-liner is drawn above her lip line, which is a stylistic choice sometimes employed by Puerto Rican women, yet looks unintentional in this image. The closeness of Arbus's focus allows the viewer to enter the world of minute facial expression that conveys a very particular emotion caught in time.
Arbus's fixation on personal presentation requires us to explore the complicated relationship between personal vanity. She stated, "You see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw... there's a point between what you want people to know about you and what you can't help people knowing about you. And that has to do with what I've always called the gap between intention and effect." Here, Arbus is speaking to the idea of ones perceived self vs. the true self. And perhaps, she is trying to say, there is no authentic self; we are merely constantly performing and showcasing the way we desire to be perceived.
Gelatin Silver Print - J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California
A family on their lawn one Sunday in Westchester, N.Y. 1968
In what many critics believe to be the beginning of the last phase of Arbus's work, this picture lampoons the post-WWII experience of suburban lawns, weekend leisure, and the nuclear family experience. A wife and husband recline on their chaise lounges in their swimsuits separated by the outdoor table that also serves to separate them metaphorically. Their son plays in the background between his parents, acting as a symbolic bridge between the husband and wife. Donning an inquisitive look directed at Arbus, the wife looks comfortable - possibly posing for the camera. The husband tries blocking the sun and possibly Arbus's camera from his sights. Their joint reaction of despair and frustration paired with a sense of emptiness and sterility found in the vast, empty lawn signals family strife.
This photograph is of Nat and June Tarnapol, a successful agent and publisher in the pop music business and his well-coiffed wife. When Arbus stopped June in a bookstore to ask her to sit for a photograph, it was because she was impeccably dressed. Arbus wrote, "...she suggested I wait until warm weather so I can do it [photograph] around the pool!" Yet, Arbus did not want to recreate an idyllic family portrait. Once photographing the wealthy family at their home in the New York suburbs, Arbus spent almost eight hours shooting the family. Her truth-by-exhaustion technique made her ultimate photo far more interesting. It is a powerful statement confirming that traditional family roles can be stifling. Her cathartic uncovering of this sense gave rise to a bold photographic narrative that became the emblematic and diarist project detailing Arbus's own life and views. By understanding this image further, one understands how the artist's personal biography can affect the work they seek to produce, which is a theme consistent in Modern and Post-Modern Art.
Gelatin Silver Photograph - Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California
A naked man being a woman, N.Y.C
This photograph is an excellent example of how Arbus could personify both type and individual identity in the same body. Arbus gained entry into intimate spaces like the bedroom of the transgendered individual pictured here, which was something Arbus was intent and successful at doing. The curtains are pulled back, serving at once to be a theatrical element and to reveal the truth about his identity. With his genitals pulled back between his thighs, the subject is posed in traditional contrapposto, drawing a comparison to classical sculpture and its adherence to idealized form and beauty akin to Michelangelo's David. The subject wears a look of pride, modeled with feminine makeup alluding to the female identity to which he aspires. Through the photo, one can see sexuality and subjectivity of identity is more varied and fluid than the norms had previously allowed.
The photo is a continued dialog of a sequence of contact sheets labeled "Catherine Bruce" and simultaneously "Bruce Catherine" conveying a binary identity. Arbus opens a Pandora's box of sexual identity issues and conventions addressed in visual form. By capturing "Bruce Catherine" appearing as an idealized human and feminine form, Arbus draws the comparison for us to understand a new definition of love and beauty through classical references. Her photo reflected on a new age of perceived comfort within society despite one's supposed otherness through the subject's confident body language and defiant gaze, which at the time this photo was taken was unusual and extraordinary. At the same time, the subject poses nude in his disheveled home, protected from his outward public life, which one can only assume is much different than his performative feminized identity that we see here channeled through Arbus.
Gelatin Silver Print - Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California
A Jewish Giant at home with his parents, in the Bronx, N.Y.
This photograph is an emotional tour of force where Arbus' direct style of photography combined with her devotion to represent the underrepresented. Eddie Carmel, standing well over seven feet tall, is unkempt and unshaved with his wrinkled shirt and jeans, standing next to his parents only with the help of a cane. His father, whose well-fitted suit and his hand neatly situated in his pocket acts as though he were posing for a classic family portrait. Carmel looms over his parents, whose gaunt stare upwards exemplifies a vastness felt by their physical difference. A viewer may not infer that this is a family photo without the help of the title. Yet, at the very core of Arbus' photo is a picture of a mother and father with their child in a typical family home.
Arbus met Carmel at Hubert's Dime Museum and later visited his family home in 1970. The living room is standard for the time period: matching patterned drapes, comfortable furniture, and quaint decorations. The unique vignette around this image stands out, for it was possibly not an intentional choice, but a necessary one due to light falloff. The subjects are standing near the wall on the opposite side of the room from Arbus, and one can imagine the artist set up behind the armchair in the foreground with her widest lens to capture the whole scene. Light falloff happens when the light cannot fully reach the lens, and in this case the vignette offers a voyeuristic feel to the image, enhancing the taboo nature of this particular domestic scene. The image is the only one from the contact sheet where Carmel stands apart from his parents. This is a deliberate choice in editing, intended to highlight what Arbus believed to be every mothers' nightmare. She said of this image, "You know how every mother has nightmares when she's pregnant that her baby will be born a monster? I think I got that in the mother's face as she glares up at Eddie, thinking, Oh my God, no." Born into abnormalities, Carmel lived a life as a sideshow attraction at the carnival since job prospects could not see past his physical stature. Arbus unearthed the hidden and dark chaos buried below one of life's biggest gambles: birthing the unintentionally strange.
Gelatin Silver Print - The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Untitled (7)
This somber and mysterious photo shows severely handicapped patients walking and stumbling along dressed in their Halloween masks. During their outdoor walk under grey skies and moonlight, Arbus makes a strong use of the camera's flash. The scene revealed goes a level beyond the usual photos of Arbus's consenting subjects living in the outside world. These patients are supposed to be in a safer place, and that location casts them, and the process of photographing them, in a different light. In addition, the scene is reminiscent of James Ensor's ghastly portrayals of the rich and corrupt, an association that adds to the complexity of interpreting this series of photographs.
Arbus spent several years trying to gain access into the New Jersey institution before finally gaining permission in 1969. There is little doubt that this series of pictures taken at the end of her life are among her most controversial for many reasons. These images were published posthumously by the approval of her daughter Doon (who is in control of her estate) and are ethically challenging since the subjects didn't give the same sorts of permissions that her other subjects did. One can only assume that the institution gave Arbus permission, although there is no formal record of this. Arbus kept extensive records of her releases and felt that it was very important to get permission from her subjects to engage with her and her work. To put these images within context of her oeuvre would mean that these mentally disabled subjects are "freaks" and among the "underbelly of society" which adds an exploitative complexity that many in the art world reject as part of her main objective as an artist. Some institutions have refused to exhibit this work. Some argue that these images were not intended to be part of her larger body of work based on the grounds that they were not numbered nor printed in exhibition ready quality (as usually done by Arbus) but only as proof prints. Though Arbus normally used descriptive titles for each of her photographs that she desired to be seen, after her death, Doon Arbus titled the series of photographs "Untitled."
Gelatin Silver Print - Collection of Carla Emil and Rich Silverstein
Biography of Diane Arbus
Childhood
Diane Nemerov grew up in New York City in a wealthy Jewish family who owned a successful fur company named Russeks. She was the second of three children who all grew-up to be creatives. (Howard, the eldest, grew up to be a Pulitzer Prize winning poet and the younger, Renee became an artist). Raised in a series of lavish homes in Upper East Side of New York City, her childhood consisted of maids and governesses helping raise her and her siblings. Diane's mother, Gertrude, struggled with bouts of depression preventing her from intellectually supporting Diane while her father, David, stayed busy with work. The rest of her life, she would try separating herself from her family and upbringing. Many have thought that she did this through her work, as an extension of her personal suffering, for she felt oppressed in her own community and felt akin to her subjects as a social outcast.
With the encouragement of her father, Arbus took up painting around 1934. Afraid of letting her family down, she never let her dislike for painting be known. In 1936, she met Allan Arbus, who was working in the advertising department at Russek's. Though she continued to study art through summer programs, she never went to college, but instead married Allan in 1941. Allan bought Arbus her first camera and turned their bathroom into a darkroom. Immediately following their marriage, she started taking photography more seriously and enrolled in classes with the famed photographer, Berenice Abbot. In 1945 their daughter Doon was born while Allan was stationed in the army. Arbus chronicled her first pregnancy sparking her curiosity in becoming a photographer herself.
Early Period
In 1941, David Nemerov hired Allan and Diane to photograph models for Russek's newspaper advertisements. Diane took to designing and styling the fashion models, while Allan photographed the models and perfected the photos in the dark room. Shortly after, they began publishing with major fashion publications such as, Vogue, Glamour, and Harper's Bazaar, which placed the Arbus' among the likes of other noted names in fashion photography such as Richard Avedon and Irving Penn.
As fashion photographers, Diane and Allan were constantly looking for new assignments, generating ideas for magazines, and traveling. Diane longed to photograph on her own terms, not just to work as a glorified stylist. Furthermore, the fact that her ideas dictated many of the photographs that made the magazine spreads endowed her with the courage to move away from fashion to find a new purpose.
After giving birth to their second daughter Amy in 1954, Arbus began studying alongside American photographer Lisette Model in 1956. Emerging as a dedicated and inspired photographer, she commenced the new chapter in her life that also meant ending her involvement with her and Allan's photography firm. For the first time, Arbus began numbering her negatives, which is a method she continued for the rest of her career. Most importantly, she started recording appointments, meetings, and ideas for prospective projects, along with quotations, bits of conversations, and books that appealed to her.
Mature Period
In 1959 when Allan and Diane separated, she found a renewed sense of purpose for her personal work. She cut down her hair, transformed her apartment into a working space filled with photos pinned up on the walls, and slept on a mattress situated on the floor. Arbus scraped together a living for herself and her two daughters through commercial work with magazines. Most notably she worked for Esquire Magazine, which sought to publish "new journalism" which employed literary techniques to enhance reporting, and gave her a unique opportunity that helped develop her artistic voice. She improvised childcare through the help of friends and family and started life as a working artist. Allan continued working as a fashion photographer, making the firm's darkroom available to Arbus and assisting her with technical matters. Photography allowed her transformation from an uptown, private-school-educated wife with a coy personality into someone who longed for an artistic voice independent from her bourgeois upbringing. She felt akin to the underrepresented and gravitated toward subjects that allowed a morbid fascination by merely looking.
She frequented Hubert's Museum freak shows, investigated body builder competitions, beauty contests, and youth gang meetings, which are all events where voyeurism is encouraged. Hubert's was located in Times Square, which was a seedy epicenter of hedonism; an area not often frequented by women. This live show was open from 1925-1969 and for 25 cents one could gaze upon human oddities, such as the bearded lady, or Zip the human pinhead, as well as performers such as sword swallowers and snake charmers. This show was a safe space for one to gaze upon unique humans, and gave Arbus a taste of where her interests were to develop. She later approached subjects independently and sought out those who live on the margins of society, those that are often thought of as grotesque.
Arbus's curiosity made her search for an unseen world, as she said of her upbringing, "the outside world was so far from us," and this led her to develop a kinship to the underrepresented, the misunderstood, and the strange. These thoughts transfixed her and preoccupied her mind for the rest of her career. She openly called her subjects on the fringes of society, "freaks", which in her eyes, was not derogatory. She said that, "(freaks) don't have to go through life dreading what may happen, it's already happened. They've passed their test. They're aristocrats." These individuals were stigmatized in their public life, but through photography, become the source of wonder and fascination for an audience to gaze infinitely.
She was very public about her feelings of being a social outcast within her own community, and sought solace in her subjects on the fringe. In turn, she channeled her frustration and by extension, her outsider feelings, into her work and sought out the eccentric. It wasn't enough to capture a likeness; through multiple visits over many years she gained the access and the trust with her subjects, which often became friendships. "What I'm trying to describe is that it's impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else's," she once wrote. "And that's what all this is a little bit about. That somebody else's tragedy is not the same as your own."
In her oeuvre we can see that she also deliberately explored the juxtaposition of these "freaks" as well as people well integrated in society. She had a vision that made her subject's bodies into visual spectacles, no matter the subject. Her images of socialites, American families, and even children evoke a grotesque tenor. She simultaneously brought the extravagance as one living as a man in a woman's clothing, on par with the extravagance of chasing the suburban American dream.
Her findings eventually led her to receive a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation to photograph "American Rites, Manners, and Customs" in 1963. In her proposal she wrote, "I want to photograph the considerable ceremonies of our present, I want to gather them, like somebody's grandmother putting up preserves, because they will have been so beautiful." This opened up doors for Arbus, and she was awarded a renewal for the Guggenheim grant in 1965, and again in 1966. Of this she wrote, "The Fellowship enabled me to go far enough to find the way to go further. I have learned to get past the door, from the outside to the inside. One milieu leads to another."
Her magazine projects and personal projects overlapped and merged, sometimes evolving into and out of one another. Marvin Israel, a lover and fellow product of an upper-class Jewish family in New York inspired Arbus to do some of her best work. Israel is also accredited for encouraging and shaping Richard Avedon's best work, among many other modern photographers of that era. He was her intellectual equal and the two shared much in common, but Israel refused to leave his wife for Arbus. Her adventurousness and curious mentality craved variety and newness to stave off feelings of restlessness and boredom. She once complained to a friend that, "she was untouched by the ordinary joys and pains that make people feel alive." She also stated that "the condition of photographing, is maybe the condition of being on the brink of conversion to anything." Arbus was truly looking for an avenue of self-fulfillment and validation in her personal life as much as her profession.
She was excited to receive this validation in 1967 with her first museum exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art alongside Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand. The exhibition entitled, New Documents, featured her ceremony photographs, street photography, and candid portraits. Arbus, conscious of the fact that her photos were different from Winogrand and Friedlander, had reservations about showing her photos, about being presented at the right time in the right way; "I always thought I'd wait until I'm ninety to have a show or.. [do] a book because I figured I was good for only one shot - that I wanted to wait until I had it all done." Director of the Department of Photography at the time John Szarkowski, wrote in his intro to the exhibition, "In the past decade this new generation of photographers has redirected the technique and aesthetic of documentary photography to more personal ends. Their aim has been not to reform life but to know it, not to persuade but to understand." Winogrand and Friedlander are both documentary street photographers, chasing the decisive moment. Arbus approached her subjects differently, and sought aspects of an unrevealed truth that is often ignored by everyday society. This show had dramatically shaped the reception of photography, for it was elevated on the level of fine art; something documentary photography had not done previously. MoMA influenced this through exhibitions and publications and sought to push the expectations of art practice, which is still part of their mission statement today.
Later Period
Around 1968, it became evident to Arbus that she would need other sources of income beyond photographic journalism to sustain herself. Her magazine publications dwindled as her work appeared less imaginative. To earn more money, she reluctantly began teaching college photography courses at Parsons and at Cooper Union and later gave a master class at her home in Westbeth. At this same time, she also grew restless of her camera materials and often wrote about losing her fondness of flash photography that once amazed her.
Arbus's grew increasingly unhealthy in the period following 1968. Her diagnoses of depression and Hepatitis B caused unwanted weight loss and a feeling of constant fatigue. Allan and Diane, though separated since 1959, finally divorced in 1969. Allan moved to California creating an even more unstable atmosphere for Diane, "I guess it was oddly enough the finality of Allan leaving (for California) that so shook me... Suddenly it was no more pretending. This was it." Soon she transferred all her emotional weight to Israel and developed a malign envy for his wife. Many of Arbus's friends and colleagues noticed her exaggerated mood swings. Her negative reaction towards many of her prescribed medications prevented her mental state from improving. Once again, money was an issue too. She declined an invitation by Walker Evans to teach a photography class at Yale since her depression made her incapable of carrying out the course and other strenuous commitments.
In the last two years of her life, she gained access to a home for the mentally handicapped in Vineland, New Jersey and photographed the residents on multiple occasions. She originally wanted to produce a book on this singular subject, which is something she had not done previously. The images were not exhibited during her lifetime, however a book was published in 1995 titled "Untitled" that consisted of 51 images and was published posthumously by her daughter Doon in conjunction with the Aperture Foundation. This body of work is ethically complex; for it is not certain that the subjects in the images gave consent, let alone were able to give consent. Arbus was sensitive to the issue of acquiring releases for her magazine work, and some images were pulled from the 1967 MoMA show because she didn't have releases from some subjects. Advocates for special needs say that the subjects probably didn't give permission or understand what being photographed entails.
In early 1971, she told her friends that photography no longer met her needs of fulfillment. Arbus grew to despise the pictures she took of the patients in New Jersey that she vehemently sought to capture for so many years. On July 26, 1971 Israel found Arbus after she committed suicide in her Greenwich Village apartment by ingesting lethal sedatives and cutting her wrists.
The Legacy of Diane Arbus
Arbus's short and troubled life resulted in a body of work that was, and continues to be, both celebrated for its compassion and condemned for its objectification. More than anything else, Arbus remains a mystery, a controversial mystery. It is often the case that art historians (and sensationalist news columnists) want to make her out to be more of a freak as to explain the nature of her work. They cite potential (and unconfirmed) sexual relations with her brother and her daughter's relationship with Marvin Israel (who was Arbus's long-time passion).
There is also controversy over Arbus's relationships with her subjects. In one infamous series, a number of photos focus on an interracial couple, but one of the photos includes a nude Arbus on top of the man. This series, and related rumors of Arbus's modus operandi have different interpretations: maybe she was engaged in an orgy with this couple, or maybe she always stripped nude when photographing nudists, or it might have been her way to make the couple more comfortable. All of this, of course, sums up to an artist that is very provocative and regularly gets re-interpreted in the age of post-modern art - a time of art-making that accepts and embraces a number of these practices (that Arbus may or may not have pioneered).
Ultimately, her courage to confront extremes in human situations influenced fashion, street, and feminist photographers. For example, Steven Meisel's edgy fashion photography created controversial magazine layouts, pairing fashion with politics and questionable social standards. His idea to shave the eyebrows of a British fashion model not only launched the model's career but also earned her a nickname, "Le Freak" that recalls the label often giving to Arbus's photographs. American photographer, Nan Goldin's deeply personal and candid portraits of the LGBT community is a direct influence of Arbus's themes of sexual identity, role-playing, and individual aberrance that distinguished Arbus from her male peers in the post-WWII era. Despite never being affiliated with feminism herself, Arbus's female perspective influenced the photography of Cindy Sherman, whose ability to explore and deconstruct female stereotypes and identity is the product of the profound, albeit unintentional, inroads Arbus made for female perception in the 1960s and 70s. The continued mythologizing of Arbus has brought her into the limelight again and again, as many institutions have brought retrospective exhibitions to the public consistently since her death.
