Diane Nemerov was born on March 14, 1923 in New York, into a wealthy 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 universe that, paradoxically, suffocated her.
In the late 1950s she began to develop her personal work, moving radically away from the fashion world. She studied with Lisette Model, who encouraged her to pursue her more disturbing vision. What emerged was something completely new: a portrait photography that sought not conventional beauty, but the psychological truth of her subjects.
Arbus photographed what the world preferred not to see: people with disabilities, circus workers, nudists, cross-dressers, twins, inhabitants of nursing homes. But she did not photograph them with compassionate distance or with clinical gaze. She photographed them as equals, directly, with frontal flash, often with permission and even complicity from those she portrayed. The result was inevitably uncomfortable: the viewer could not look without feeling that it was they who were being observed.
Her technique was deliberate: she used a Mamiya medium-format camera, which forced her to look down at the viewfinder, establishing a different physical relationship with her subjects. Neutral or domestic backgrounds do not distract: all visual weight falls upon 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 was the first American female photographer to exhibit at the Venice Biennale. Her influence on contemporary portraiture is impossible to overstate.