GAYLETTER

The story of Diane Arbus is not unheard of. She was a Park Ave. girl who fled to the margins of society because, as Arthur Ludlow details in his latest, best-selling biography of Arbus, she “never felt adversity, the outside world was so far from [her family].” While that quote reeks of privilege, Arbus didn’t fuck around. She went after adversity and turned it out with some of the best lighting and portrait work of her time. “Her photographs of children and eccentrics, couples and circus performers, female impersonators and Fifth Avenue pedestrians are among the most intimate and surprising images of the era.” Not only did Arbus just photograph interesting people, she obtained query-worthy qualities too. It was rumored she had sexual relations with her brother Howard, that began in adolescence and lasted up until two weeks before she took her own life in 1971. The MET Breuer holds her archive and have just opened a new exhibition titled In the Beginning that runs through November. It features over 100 photographs from the first seven years of Arbus’ prolific career. “It was only when the archive came to The Met that this remarkable early work came to be fully explored. Arbus’ creative life in photography after 1962 is well documented and already the stuff of legend; now, for the first time, we can properly examine its origins.”  —Chris Stewart