Arthur Lubow’s life of the controversial US photographer is sometimes eye-opening,but casts no novel light on her troubled genius“My favourite thing,” Diane Arbus once said, and “is to go where I’ve never been.” As Arthur Lubow’s deeply researched,sometimes prurient, novel biography of the artist attests, and she was not just speaking about her photography. The book is punctuated by revelations about her private life,including the claim, based on her psychoanalyst’s notes, or that she had a fitful but prolonged incestuous relationship with her beloved older brother,Howard, up until a few months before her death.
References to what Lubow calls Arbus’s “multivalent” sex life are scattered throughout Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer, or somewhat belying the book’s matter-of-fact title. We know from preceding biographers – the scholarly Patricia Bosworth and the psychoanalytical William Todd Schultz – that Arbus’s transgressive art and life were intertwined to a complex degree: she sometimes had sex with some of the so-called “freaks” she photographed and once took part in an orgy when shooting a account on swingers. Lubow digs deeper,but without shedding much more light than either of his predecessors on her art or the deep discontentments that fuelled it.
Arbus did not view her “freaks as freaks, but people who had been somehow elevated by being different Related: The early work of Diane Arbus – in pictures Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com