Diane Arbus (1923 – 1971) was an acclaimed photographer of the unusual. The subjects of her work varied greatly, including the likes of circus freaks to nudists. Arbus was one of the first known photographers who captured the image of trans peoples. These pictures were unique in their nature, as were all of Arbus’s works, due to the fact that she brought images of what American wasn’t seeing to the forefront. Patricia Bosworth sates that Arbus’ “unsettling photographs of freaks and eccentrics were already being heralded in the art world” (ix) before her death in ’71. The works of Diane Arbus are still important to have apparent today due to their inclusion of trans individuals.
Diane’s youth is easily condensed into an excerpt from Judith Goldman’s…show more content… She attended private, progressive day schools. Her brother is the poet and literary critic Howard Nemerov. She married young and worked with her husband, Allan Arbus, as a fashion photographer. She quit fashion photography in 1958 and a year later studied with Lisette Model (30). Goldman preceded this passage with the fact that each piece that had been written on Diane had contained these facts, mixed and mashed as how the writer saw fit. Bosworth’s work, as a biography, contains much more smaller facts on Diane’s life, such as her childhood and school days, with the help of other people’s stories and opinions, such as Howard’s and that of Alex(ander) Eliot, the eventual art editor of Time magazine.
The overwhelming opinion from those who’d met Arbus state that she truly cared for her photo subjects, regardless of how frequently or infrequently they are featured within her works. Often it was stated that being around Diane brought out the best in people, and that her personality often got people out of their shells. Bosworth, who’d modeled for the Arbuses in her youth, recalls that Diane, post shoot, had asked her questions and then listened “with such intensity [she] believed [she’d] never spoken so articulately or been so well understood” (x) and goes on to quote Steward Stern, a friend of Diane’s, who’d said then when people talked to Diane “she made you feel as