Diane Arbus’s off-kilter portraits created a newly direct and discomfiting mode of address in modern photography. This exhibition, at the Louisiana, Humlebaek, is her first major survey in Scandinavia; it includes some 150 photographs from the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario, covering the full span of her short career – from early 35mm prints to the sharply focused square images she favoured after 1962 – as well as the changing faces of New York and its inhabitants over the course of the 1950s–70s. Arbus gained recognition among photographers during her lifetime, as her work was published in magazines like Esquire and Harper’s Bazaar and she was included in MoMA’s ground-breaking ‘New Documents’ show in 1967, but it was only after her death by suicide in 1971 that broader recognition of her work began to take shape, with her posthumous inclusion in the Venice Biennale the following year – the first photographer ever to be shown at Venice – heralded as a sensation. Find out more from the Louisiana’s website.
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Puerto Rican woman with a beauty mark, N.Y.C (1965), Diane Arbus. Art Gallery of Ontario. © Estate of Diane Arbus
Couple eating, N.Y.C. (1956), Diane Arbus. Art Gallery of Ontario. © Estate of Diane Arbus
Blaze Starr in her living room, Baltimore, MD (1964), Diane Arbus. Art Gallery of Ontario. © Estate of Diane Arbus
Art Gallery of Ontario. © Estate of Diane Arbus
Three Female Impersonators, N.Y.C. (1962), Diane Arbus. Art Gallery of Ontario. © Estate of Diane Arbus