Diane Arbus: Revelations

With essays by Sandra Phillips, Neil Selkirk and Doon Arbus and a 100-page chronology of the life of Diane Arbus by Doon Arbus. Between 1954 and her suicide in 1971 Diane Arbus took some 150,000 photographs. She had grown up in the same New York milieu as her friend Richard Avedon. She was the daughter of an upper middle class Jewish family that owned a Fifth Avenue clothing store. Her posthumous retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1972 showed some 150 portraits upon which her reputation was built and has been sustained ever since. Her subjects ranged from anonymous strangers found on the street to celebrities, freaks, circus people and nudists. They are some of the most powerful photographs ever made. The 1972 MoMA catalogue has never been out of print and has sold unparalleled quantities. The great retrospective drawn from her entire career has until now remained unpublished. This is a milestone book for which we have been waiting years. The book is published on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition starting in San Francisco in September 2003. It will come to the V&A in London in October 2005 and will run there until January 2006.