Presentation two-Diane Arbus, one body of work.

Revelations

This is the only book I could find on Diane Arbus called revelations.

Diane Arbus discovered most of her subjects in her hometown of New York City. She photographed people she found on the city streets in the 1950s to 1960s. The photographs from this period, explore the relationship between appearance of  illusion and belief.

Most importantly, Diane’s photographs show the encounter that becomes the central drama of the picture.

This book has all of her portrait work in which I shall show a few of the photographs she had taken 

Identical Twins, photographed in 1967

One of Diane Arbus' most recognizable images is "Identical Twins” - a portrait of twin sisters who are identical but yet not the same, This was photographed in 1967.

This photo is of two sisters standing side by side. One of the sisters gives a slight smile, whilst the other offers a slight frown.

The girls are wearing the same black dress with white collars and cuffs, white tights and thick white headbands in their hair. They are both looking straight into the camera and as you look from one to the other you realizes that their features aren’t so identical.

With this image it seems she was less interested in the composition and focused more on the lighting, which she lit with direct flash.

Child with Toy Hand Grenade

This is Diane Arbus’ photo shoot of ‘child with toy hand grenade. I put this in as I thought it was interesting to see how Diane got to her finished piece. As you can see she did a lot of experimenting with composition and each photograph has the boy with different facial expressions. This is because Diane wanted to get a different facial expression off the boy making him look awkward and uncomfortable.

Diane Arbus quoted ‘I work from awkwardness’, and she has in her hand the image of the ‘child with toy hand grenade’.

This to me is exactly what I feel when looking at any of Diane Arbus images ‘awkward’. There's something about the way these images are different from what you see in other photographs. The models aren't pretty or calm, infact there more on edge and disturbed. This is a unique style of work which I think Diane has done incredibly well to make her own work stand out.

Picture

I found this magazine called picture which Diana Arbus featured in in 1964.

 Magazine spread

This magazine spread was featuring ‘Christmas tree in a living room,’ photographed in1963 and ‘A Young Brooklyn Family Going for a Sunday Outing.’ photographed in 1966.

These two images are very different in the sense that the first image is indoors and has no people involved in it, where as the second one is outdoors of a family portrait.

To me the first image is about how empty a house can be around Christmas time as people are very busy with working and shopping, preparing themselves for Christmas day. This image makes me feel a little sad as the Christmas tree looks very lonely hided in the corner of the room as if its been forgotten about.

The second image to me is on a typical young family outing and about spending time together. The children look irritated and the parents look fed up, was this to do with the way Diane Arbus was photographing them? Or is it simply to do with coping as a family in that day and age.