Monday, October 29, 2012

Exhibition of two hundred photographs by Diane Arbus opens at Foam in Amsterdam


Art Daily Newsletter
Boy with a straw hat waiting to march in a pro-war parade, N.Y.C. 1967 © The Estate of Diane Arbus.

AMSTERDAM.- Diane Arbus (1923-1971) revolutionized the art she practiced. Her bold subject matter and photographic approach produced a body of work that is often shocking in its purity, in its steadfast celebration of things as they are. Her gift for rendering strange those things we consider most familiar, and for uncovering the familiar within the exotic, enlarges our understanding of ourselves. Arbus found most of her subjects in New York City, a place that she explored as both a known geography and as a foreign land, photographing people she discovered during the 1950s and 1960s. She was committed to photography as a medium that tangles with the facts. Her contemporary anthropology-portraits of couples, children, carnival performers, nudists, middle-class families, transvestites, zealots, eccentrics, and celebrities-stands as an allegory of the human experience, an exploration of the relationship between appearance and identity, illusion and belief, theater and reality. Thi ... More

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