Diane Nemerov was born on March 14, 1923, in New York, into a well-off Jewish family. She married young to Allan Arbus, and together they worked for years in fashion photography for publications like Vogue and Harper's Bazaar—a glamorous world that, paradoxically, suffocated her.
In the late 1950s she began to develop her personal work, moving radically away from the fashion scene. She studied with Lisette Model, who encouraged her to pursue her more unsettling vision. What emerged was something entirely new: portrait photography that sought not conventional beauty, but the psychological truth of its subjects.
Arbus photographed what the world preferred not to see: people with disabilities, circus workers, nudists, transvestites, twins, residents of asylums. But she didn't photograph them with compassionate distance or a clinical gaze. She photographed them as equals, directly, with frontal flash, often with the permission and even complicity of those portrayed. The result was inevitably uncomfortable: the viewer couldn't look without feeling that it was he who was being observed.
Her technique was deliberate: she used a medium-format Mamiya camera, which forced her to look down into the viewfinder, establishing a different physical relationship with her subjects. The neutral or domestic backgrounds don't distract: all the visual weight falls on the person.
Susan Sontag wrote about her with ambivalence: she recognized her genius but questioned the ethics of that gaze. That tension is an inseparable part of her legacy.
Arbus died on July 26, 1971, in New York. In 1972, she became the first American photographer to exhibit at the Venice Biennale. Her influence on contemporary portraiture is impossible to overstate.