The Environmental Portrait: Diane Arbus

-

 Diane Arbus is an American photographer who mainly used analogue black and white photography. Arbus's work was popular due to her subjects being marginalized communities; it was described as "bizarre, fantastic, and psychologically complex". While her later work was impressive, Arbus began her photography career doing fashion photography, which was very reputable, but this is work that was not inspiring to her. 



While Arbus grew up in an affluent home, her childhood upbringing was not the best. Having been in a more affluent part of New York for a larger part of her life, she took a liking to subjects from marginalized communities. This interest brought out some of her best early works. I commonly refer back to the image of the child in the park and enjoy the pure rawness of the image of the child not being posed, just naturally behaving. 



The rawness of her images, combined with the uncanny feeling it evokes, and the subjects, are what inspired me to further look into Diane's work. While I did not take uncanny or abnormal pictures, I admire all of Diane's images and her ability to capture these moments. Considering that she also does not use a tripod and creates hand-held black and white images, is something that I like and breaks that barrier between subject and audience. 


Diane Arbus. Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C., 1962. 1962 | MoMA

Diane Arbus Photography, Bio, Ideas | TheArtStory

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Light Drawing and Long Exposure: David Lebe

-
Image
 For this project, the person I looked more into for Light drawing inspiration was David Lebe. David's black and white drawing images from 1979-1980 are primarily interesting to me compared to his older work as he began to integrate more into the composition of the images. I enjoy the implementation of backgrounds and scenic scenes that he includes in his drawings.  Another aspect of his images that I enjoy is the attention to detail for smaller details, such as shirt creases and seams. This adds depth to the image and elevates it from a basic silhouette to a more detailed drawing.  Looking at his light drawing images from 1982, they include more of the object rather than the outline of the figures that he did in his early works. His usage of long exposure allows for more details of the object to be seen. While there are some aspects of the darkness of his early work that I enjoy, I can appreciate the visuals of the objects that are seen in his later work. 
Read more

Steve McCurry: Color and light

-
Image
  There is something interesting when you're just looking into the eyes of someone. No expression just eye contact. it's interesting that McCurry tends to shoot most of his portraits with little to no facial expression. In the past we have discussed how eyes are the windows into our soal and I believe that that is something that McCurrys images show. Living in places like the U.S. where we live in individualistic societies and with limited intimate human interaction making eye contact with anyone can be seen as uncomfortable, However the way that Steve's portraits intentionally put you in the place where you have to share a moment with the person in the photograph even for a second. McCurry also does a great job of including cultures from many different parts of the world.  In a world full of conflict McCurry photos are great story tellers. it is interesting that one of his first and most popular image of a young girl from Afghanistan shows that creating of bridges to con...
Read more

Lee Freelander: Reflections

-
Image
 Often, we discuss how cars aren't the most interesting thing that we can photograph as they're generally similar. Freelander has an entire series where he photographs from inside of his car called " America by Car". This series was interesting to me because of the composition and framing of the images and how different each one was.  As someone who road trips often the beauty of traveling by car is being able to see geographical and infrastructure differences across the country. This type of photography is also unique because being in a car that is constantly in motion means you're constantly getting a new angle or image and most likely will not be the same from one second to the other. This is where framing really plays a role in these images where those same parts of cars that would be boring otherwise create a division that separate aspects and create a completely different image then what is on the other side of the frame. Also, in the topic of framing Freela...
Read more