American photographer who is an example of those personalities that open new symbolic worlds for those which were not considered citizens - as transvestites and all the people integrated in trans collective were viewed. She represented them as people of bones and flesh in all their humanity.
Diane Arbus (née Nemerov) was born in New York City into a wealthy Jewish family. She fell in love with Allan Arbus at age 14, and married him soon after turning 18, despite her parents' objections.
As a husband-wife team, the Arbuses became successful in the fashion world. As Diane began to take her own photographs, she took formal lessons with Lisette Model at The New School in New York. After separating from her husband by 1959, Arbus worked extensively as a photojournalist, her photos appearing in Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Harper's Bazaar and Sunday Times magazines, among others.
But her life turned in a different way. She left the world of glamour preferring to take portraits of those whom society didn’t want to see and keep hidden from public eyes, denying their representation and involving darkness.
There are four topics in Arbus’ work: deformation, transformation, social rites and ceremonies; and mask and mental illness (Cuesta 2006). Arbus’ approach was always respecful and without affectation. All of these topics are very interesting, but we prefer to focus on the transvestite photographs. Her camera was the first one to be close trans cotidianity and space. She presented transvestites as any legitimate member of the society. In the same way as Charles Baudelaire and Les Fleurs du mal opened new forms of poetry and art, Arbus’ revolucionary work changed the concept of beauty and stretched the limits of the acceptable.
Her photographs present the naked truth, because the people who appear them allows us to see an essential piece of their identity: their bodies. But they also invite us to be part of their house, their room, their curlers. This could show us the simplicity and confidence in the relationship between Arbus and the people she photographed. A quality of her work is the humanization of those that were understood as monsters by society, those that for her were only another human being. She really cared about those people and photograph became an excuse to begin relationships of friendship and respect.
Diane Arbus is an example of those personalities that open new symbolic worlds for those which were not considered citizens - as transvestites and all the people integrated in trans collective were viewed. She represented them as people of bones and flesh in all their humanity.
A young man in curlers at home on West 20th Street, N.Y.C. 1966
Two men dancing at drag ball, New York 1970
Naked man being a woman, N.Y.C. 1968
i really love these photos, the 'rawness' of them just makes them that more personal as you feel as though you get a real insight into the persons lives..
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