24/10/2003
Diane Arbus
SFMoMA, San Francisco
Organized by SFMoMA to include all of the artist's iconic photographs as well as many that have never been publicly exhibited, Diane Arbus Revelations is the most complete survey of her work ever assembled.
Revelations
Diane Arbus (1923 - 1971) found most of her subjects in New York City and its environs during the 1950s and 1960s. Her portraits of couples, children, carnival performers, nudists, middle-class families, transvestites, people on the street, zealots, eccentrics, and celebrities explore the relationship between appearance and identity, illusion and belief, theater and reality. Organized by SFMOMA to include all of the artist's iconic photographs as well as many that have never been publicly exhibited, Diane Arbus Revelations is the most complete survey of her work ever assembled.
Arbus revolutionized the art she practiced and her achievement continues to be a wholly original force in photography. Her bold subject matter and photographic approach produced a body of work that is often shocking in its purity, in its steadfast celebration of things as they are. Her gift for rendering strange those things we consider most familiar, and uncovering the familiar within the exotic, enlarges our understanding of ourselves. Even the earliest examples of her work - in spite of their stylistic similarities with other documentary photographers of the period - betray elements of Arbus's distinctive sensibility through the expression on a face, someone's posture, the character of the light, and the personal implications of objects in a room or landscape. These elements, animated by the singular relationship between the photographer and her subject, conspire to implicate the viewer with the force of a personal encounter.
Diane Arbus's insight into the world of subcultures, codes and rituals, utopias, and unlikely affinities informed the whole of her work. By the time she published her first two magazine projects, "The Vertical Journey" and "The Full Circle," in the early sixties, Arbus had established the style and character of her approach to her subject matter. Her 1963 Guggenheim Fellowship application, American Rites, Manners, and Customs, summarized her territory as a photographer - one that encompassed projects as varied as Winners, Pseudo Places, Female Impersonators, Marriage, and Children of the Very Rich. A year after her second Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966, 30 of her photographs were included, along with the work of two other photographers, in the controversial exhibition New Documents at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. A year after her death in 1971, the Museum of Modern Art hosted a posthumous retrospective, the first and only major museum exhibition of her work to date.
CATALOGUE
Diane Arbus Revelations
The book reproduces 200 full-page duotones of Diane Arbus photographs spanning her entire career, many of them never before seen. It also includes an essay by Sandra S. Phillips and a discussion of Arbus's printing techniques by Neil Selkirk. A 104-page illustrated chronology by Elisabeth Sussman and Doon Arbus is composed mainly of excerpts of the artist's writings and amounts to a kind of autobiography. These texts help illuminate the meaning of Diane Arbus's controversial and astonishing vision. This Random House publication is available in hardcover ($100) and in a special paperback edition ($50). Both catalogues are available in the SFMOMA MuseumStore.
Image:
Diane Arbus
Woman with a veil on Fifth Avenue, N.Y.C. 1968
© 1972 The Estate of Diane Arbus LLC
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PUBLIC PROGRAMS:
PROGRAMS, CLASSES, AND EVENTS
Saturday, October 25, 2003
Opening Day Lecture and Conversation
Diane Arbus: Behind the Image
Sandra S. Phillips, senior curator of photography,
SFMOMA, and exhibition cocurator
Elisabeth Sussman, guest exhibition cocurator
1:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.
Phyllis Wattis Theater
Join the exhibition curators for an afternoon of conversation on the
work of Diane Arbus. Phillips reflects on the relationship of artist and subject in Arbus's ½vre, while Sussman discusses the photographer's personal influences and the evolution of her distinctive vision. A dialogue with the audience follows.
$12 general; $8 SFMOMA members, students with ID, and seniors.Tickets are available at the Museum with no surcharge or through Ticketweb.com.
SFMoMA
151 Third Street
San Francisco