The humanity of Diane Arbus | The Press

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is offering an exhibition this Thursday devoted to the American avant-garde photographer Diane Arbus: some 90 black and white shots taken between 1956 and 1971, mainly in New York. Images of great humanity, the artist having drawn up in 15 years a sensitive portrait of New York’s diversity and its rites.

Eric Clement
The Press

This exhibition of the work of Diane Arbus (1923-1971) is of historical and artistic interest. This is only the third exhibition in Canada dedicated to the great American photographer since her suicide in 1971. The display comes from the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), which acquired 522 prints in 2017. with silver gelatin from Diane Arbus. And who presented this exhibition in Toronto during the pandemic, thanks to a curatorship of Sophie Hackett, curator of photography at the AGO.

“Diane Arbus did not limit herself to photographing people who corresponded to the social and aesthetic norms of her time, on the contrary. She preferred to focus on people on the margins of society,” MMFA chief curator Mary-Dailey Desmarais told the media during a press visit. Diane Arbus has, in a way, paid homage to human diversity, this pluralism that we honor more and more, rightly, today. “The psychological side of the people photographed is also very present,” added Anne Grace, curator of modern art at the MMFA.

Organized chronologically, the exhibition presents the photos taken with a 35 mm camera and a Rolleiflex giving square prints (6 x 6). The works chosen by Sophie Hackett represent New Yorkers with often atypical personalities. Nudist retired couple photographed in their apartment, disabled people, circus, dance or theater artists, women with original headdresses, bodybuilders, transvestites, zoo animals, corpses or even personalities such as James Brown or Jorge Luis Borges. Often daring images that give an idea of ​​the variety of New York society in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, a reality that the media of the time reflected little.

We find the most famous photograph of Diane Arbus, True twins. Two 7-year-old girls photographed side by side. An image in which we try to detect the physical differences between Cathleen and Colleen Wade. A snapshot that inspired Stanley Kubrick for his film The Shining. To read more information on this photograph (which we cannot reproduce), go to the link below.

The exhibition also presents, in a showcase, pages from the popular American magazine Esquire who published the photographs of Diane Arbus on 1^er July 1960. A first for the artist. A report in New York titled The Vertical Journey, with a wide variety of themes, again. Magazines will have allowed Diane Arbus to publicize her work in the 1960s when art galleries did not yet give visibility to art photographers.

“I want to photograph these remarkable ceremonies that make up our present, insofar as, living here and now, we tend to see only what is incidental, meaningless and without structure. […] What is ceremonial and curious and banal will become legendary”, wrote Diane Arbus, in 1962, in a letter addressed to the Guggenheim Foundation in order to obtain a grant. Documented with humanity, the curious and the banal will indeed have forged its legend…

Diane Arbus – Photographs, 1956-1971at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, until January 29