Portfolios

In 2016, The Met Breuer presented in the beginning, a landmark exhibition of Arbus’s early photographs from the first seven years of her career, from 1956–1962. These 35mm pictures had previously been presented in a supporting role to her later, iconic images. The show and accompanying catalogue marked the first time many of the images were ever seen.

The publication of Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph in 1972—along with the related posthumous retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art—offered the general public its first encounter with the breadth and power of her achievements. The response was unprecedented.

“Like most photographers of her time, Diane Arbus looked to magazines as the sole means of earning a living taking pictures, which was not merely gratifying but essential. They offered her an opportunity to work and have her work seen, gave her access to people and events she might not have been able to photograph otherwise, and, perhaps most important of all, encouraged her to think of herself as a professional.” — Doon Arbus & Marvin Israel, foreword, Magazine Work

Diane Arbus Revelations was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2003 and traveled to museums in the United States and Europe through 2006. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue offered the deepest exploration to date of Arbus’s career and her impact on photography.

The images from Untitled were made at residences for people with developmental disabilities, places Arbus repeatedly returned to for picnics and dances, and at Halloween between 1969 and 1971, the last years of her life. “These photographs… can’t be confined by critical categorization, because they are purely ecstatic; they are the pictures Arbus had been waiting all her life to take,” wrote Hilton Als. “It’s as if the most remarkable images she produced in the early sixties … were faint talismans leading Arbus to this final study, in which her justly renowned control cannot compete with the unconscious power of her subjects.”

A Box of Ten Photographs is a portfolio of ten prints that Diane Arbus felt best represented her photographic achievement. This rare portfolio was one of the last projects Arbus was working on at the time of her death in 1971.