Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus was a photographer and professor of photography, the leading exponent of a photographic movement that took place in New York in the mid-20th century, initiated by Lisette Model based on the concept of truthfulness and empathy, far from the visual effects of technical resources. His work, based especially on street portraits, builds an inventory of the human species and ‘undresses’ it emotionally, with empathy, without technical artifice and emphasizing beauty far from academic canons.

Since the trial «Freak Show» Susan Sontag, who described Arbus as a tourist in hell fighting the ennui of her bourgeois existence with her photographs, has simplified her work as that of a portraitist of ‘freaks’ or ‘little monsters’ and accused her of using the camera in a cynical way, although such reduction has more to do with the way her photographs are read.

Paradoxically, although she belonged to a generation of authors who valued the photobook above all else, she did not publish any book during her lifetime. Her ‘Monographic’ of Aperture of 1972 was posthumous and is today considered one of the most important works in the history of photography.