Diane
Arbus: Family Albums
2 September - 7 December 2003
Diane Arbus's international
reputation and career were launched in 1967 when she was invited
to participate in the Museum of Modern Art's New Documents show.
Then in 1972—a year following her suicide—John Szarkowski,
MoMA's curator of photography, organized a major retrospective
of her work. His introductory wall label began with this paragraph:
"Diane Arbus's pictures challenge the basic assumptions
on which most documentary photography has been thought to rest,
for they deal with private rather than social realities, with
psychological rather than historical facts, with the prototypical
and mythic rather than the topical and temporal. Her photographs
record the outward signs of inner mysteries."
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Diane Arbus
Blaze Starr at Home
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The museum's current exhibition,
co-organized with the Spencer Museum of Art, the University of
Kansas, not only explores Arbus's relationship to the tradition
of documentary photography but also focuses special attention
on her family pictures. "Family" is used both strictly
and loosely. On one hand, it refers to Arbus's many pictures of
traditional families; on the other, family refers to communities
and collectivities of people who, though not held together by
blood or marriage, nonetheless share a special, demonstrable bond.
To examine these two senses of family, the exhibition uses as
its basic theme the idea of a family album, which is taken directly
from the artist's own frequently repeated wish to produce a family
album for publication.
This exhibition promises
a renewed consideration of the photographer by bringing forward
an important cache of new material, most especially the contact
sheets from six different family portrait sessions undertaken
by Arbus between the mid-1960s and her death in 1971. Adding
substantially to the small number of Arbus prints that have
been available for public scrutiny, more than fifty sheets contain
some 600 individual shots. Arranged roughly in the sequence
in which the individual frames of the roll film were exposed,
they afford a rare glimpse into Arbus's working methods and
provide new opportunities to gain a keener understanding of
her work.
After its close at
the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, the exhibition will travel
to the Grey Art Gallery, New York University (13 January-27
March 2004); Portland Museum of Art Maine (5 June-1 August 2004);
Spencer Museum of Art, the University of Kansas (16 October
2004-16 January 2005); Portland Art Museum, Ore-gon (19 February-24
April 2005); Georgia Museum of Art, Athens (18 June-14 August
2005); and Reynolda House, Winston Salem, North Carolina (15
September-4 December 2005).
