"Arbus’s career as a photographer seemed to be almost driven by a need to look for the reality she had missed growing up. She needed to see and feel life as it was really lived. Although she was born in 1923, she did not have to suffer through the Great Depression like most.
She was raised with nannies, butlers, maids, and chauffeurs. These other adults in her life almost took the place of her parents, who were rarely there, physically or emotionally. She would often talk of her childhood as having a sense of unreality.
She divorced her husband Allan (photographer, because of whom she entered the photographic world); this separation gave her the freedom to shoot subjects that interested her and to develop her own photographic style.
Diane took classes with famed photographer
Lisette Model. Arbus learned her most important lesson from Model, which was
not to let fear stand in her way and to believe in her talent. Model was an
independent and aggressive woman, the exact opposite of Arbus. Arbus used this
time to develop her own self-confidence and began to use her fear of people to
stimulate her vision as a photographer. For the rest of her life, she would
talk about photography as an adventure and her fear as a stimulus. (...)
Athe the age of 48, like her mother and her ongoing depression, she committed suicide.
In her photographies, her legacy, she is showing us the mask that most of us wear and how silly it really looks. She makes it blatantly obvious that we all look a little awkward, pretending to be someone we are not. (...)
What she left behind was a body of work that forces us to ask our own questions about our humanity, the masks we wear, and our own voyeuristic tendencies. Diane Arbus may have been someone that makes us uncomfortable, but I think she knew that. She wanted us, more than anything, to see what she saw; that underneath it all, we are all the same."
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