Diane Arbus: A Biography

by Patricia Bosworth

Like Frida Kahlo and Georgia O’Keefee, Diane Arbus exerts a fascination rooted in both her art and her life. Her startling photographic images of [little people], twins, transvestites, and “freaks” seemed from the first to redefine both the normal and the abnormal in our lives and they were already becoming part of the iconography of the age when Arbus committed suicide in 1971. Arbus herself remained an enigma until the publication of this first full biography.

Patricia Bosworth examines the life behind the eerie, mesmerizing photographs: Diane’s pampered childhood; her passionate marriage to Allan Arbus and their work together as fashion photographers during the fifties; the emotional upheaval surrounding the end of that marriage; and the radically dark, liberating, and ultimately tragic turn Diane’s art took during the sixties. Bosworth’s engrossing book is a compassionate portrait of the woman behind some of the most powerful photographs of our time.

INCLUSION CRITERIA

There is significant indication that the subject of this biography, Diane Arbus, was attracted to people of multiple genders.