Diane Arbys: A Brief Biography

DIANE ARBYS’ was born Diane NEMEROV on March, 14, 1923, in New York City, her mother Gertrude, chose her daughter’s name pronouncing it “Dee-Ann.” A wealthy New York family that ran RUSSEK’, a fashionable Fifth Avenue department store. Diane’s older brother was Howard NEMEROV a Pulitzer Pulitzer-winning poet who was named U.S. poet laureate in 1988. Her younger sister, Renee SPSRKIS, became a sculptor and designer.
Diane’s artistic and literary gifts were apparent early on. Her father encouraged her to become a painter, and she studied art in high school. At the age of 14 she fell in love with Allan ARBUS, the 19 -year -old nephew of one of her father’s business partners. Diane and Allan were married as soon as she turned 18, in 1941.
She learned photography from his husband, author Allan ARBUS.
Together, they found success with fashion work. The couple pursued a shared interest in photography, turning the bathroom of their Manhattan apartment into a part-time darkroom. David NEMEROV gave them work shooting fashion photographs for RUSSEK’S advertisements. After the war, the ARBUS career as a commercial photographers took off, and soon they were working for top magazines and advertising agencies. A photograph that Diane and Allan made for Vogue magazine of a father and son reading a newspaper was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s popular “The family Man” show in 1955. Several of Diane ARBUS early photographs in the current exhibition show her trying out her own version of street photography. A turning point came when she took a class with the Viennese-born photographer Lisette Model at New York City’s New school. In 1959 Diane separated from her husband and she and her children moved to a carriage house in Greenwich Village with her their two daughters. In 1959 Diana obtained her first magazine assignment, a photo essay about New York City for Esquire that included portraits of a Skid Row eccentric, a side show performer known as the Jungle Creep, a young socialite and an anonymous
corpse. The picture did not have the distinctive sharp-focus look we generally associate with ARBUS. In the 1950’s and early 60’s she was using a 35 -millimeter camera and natural lightening, and her work from that period showed the influence of Model, Robert Frank and other practitioners of street photography. Like them, she favored blurred surface and grainy texture. A long way from the tidy look of a mainstream commercial photographs. Around 1962, she switched to a 2 ¼ format camera, which allowed her to create sharper images with brilliant detail. ARBUS made her intense relationship with the people she photographed the subject of her work. For several years ARBUS distinctive photographs proved popular with magazine editors. Fascinated by risk-taking, Diane had a long embraced the New York art world’s life-on-edge attitudes about money, social status and sexual freedom. She pursued the same kind of thrill in her photographs. ARBUS would take pictures of wax museums, dance halls, and flophouses. She often said that her favorite this is to go where I’ve never been. One project that particularly engaged her was a series of photographs begin in 1969 of residents at state institutions for the