 Diana Arbus' photos are an intimate insight into the mind of a photographer. She struggled with mental health issues throughout all of her life and before her untimely suicide in 1971 the body of work that she built up is as much a reflection of her own mental state as it is of the people for whom she was photographing. When we look at her portfolio over her entire career it paints a very interesting portrait of this photographer considered by many to be the mother of contemporary art photography. Her photographs are both challenging and rewarding. How's it? How's it? Thank you ever so much for joining me here today on The Photographic Eyes. We look at the photographer, Diana Arbus. Diana Arbus' brilliance really was to capture this transition between what's socially acceptable. The personas that we have developed and nurtured and we wear on a day-to-day basis and that transition too the unconscious responses that are at the heart of our true selves and what can be more telling than this sort of transition than looking at the photograph of the boy with the hand grenade. You see in the contact sheet she meets this young man in New York and takes a series of photographs of her and he runs through the gambit of what he thinks he's supposed to do because by this time in a child's life he's already been conditioned to behave a certain way in front of the camera. And then of course a switch is thrown and all of a sudden the frustrated and wild child within him emerges and that's the brilliance. If you want the brilliance of Diana in one single image, it's that. This ability to tease and recognise or to tease out and recognise that switch and that brief moment where we are just our honest and true selves inside. The majority of Diana Obst's work was conducted and created in the 1960s so naturally given the social mores of the time it was not without some controversy. The portrait man with the curlers was actually physically spat on when it was first shown. Don't forget that this was a time when the gay community was actively being ostracised and treated as second-class citizens. So for Diana to show work that somehow... I don't want to use the word celebrated because that's not the right word to use when talking about Diana Obst's photography but portrayed what I think the majority of people considered to be inferior people somehow broken or damaged as normal everyday human beings who were just the same as you and I must have been a really incendiary thing to show to people and it's no wonder that it caused such diverse and divisive reactions. Diana Obst wrote to Walker Evans about being drawn to people who reminded of her family in the early days of her career and she specifically mentioned her grandmother, this was a Russian matriarch who she described as being rather vulgar but superb and like a contemporary witch and I love the way that Diana is treating humanity if you want to call it that much like her own family she's seeking some sort of recognition for both the people who were out there in the world and herself and she did remark that she felt that... as embarrassed as she was to say it that she felt that if she didn't photograph the things that she saw then they wouldn't exist for anybody else and I find that a really fascinating way of looking at one's photographs that unless you somehow record it you put it in film or on a print that what you've seen does not exist Dionne Arbus' photography started off on 35mm when she was walking around the streets and you can see this in her early work it's all very grainy, very blurry and overexposed and later on she moved into medium format and there's something I think that has helped elevate her work at this point that I haven't really ever sort of discussed and this is the physical act of using a medium format when you photograph in 35mm the camera is up to your eye and the camera is a physical barrier between your face and the face of the subject whom you're photographing whereas with a medium format camera certainly one like Dionne Arbus was using which has a waist level finder you don't have this physical barrier between yourself and the subject in the same way that you do with 35mm she can look down, she can compose the image but then she can look up and engage with the subject because the camera doesn't need to be in front of her face and this creates I think an air of intimacy between the subject and the photographer and an interaction that's simply not possible with 35mm despite being lauded as an artist and coming from a wealthy background Dionne Arbus struggled quite significantly financially and so much so that in 1970 she produced a portfolio of prints called a box of 10 prints by Dionne Arbus and this was a price that I'd imagine to modernise was a fairly reasonable $1,000 and this was intended to be an addition of $50 however only four of those were ever produced before her suicide in 1971 because autism was given to a close friend two others were sold to some various people and Ansel Adams bought the other but it just goes to show how wide ranging and how respected Dionne Arbus' photography was certainly she was laying the foundations for contemporary art photography this idea that photographs could be something that would be collected and I think that's amazing that a photographer of the stature of Ansel Adams decided that having a keepsake of her prints was worthwhile the portfolio contains some of her most famous photographs, the twins which no doubt you may have seen at some point a print of which that sold for $475,000 which if you bought one of those boxes in 1970 would be a handsome return of investment and of course the Jewish giant at home which also sold for a considerable sum later on Dionne Arbus drew inspiration from many photographers she was a good friend of Walker Evans and she also got ideas from a photographer called August Sander and now his photography was in sort of Germany turn of the century up until the 1930s to 1940s photographing ordinary folk and again much like Dionne Arbus the people possibly on the fringes he's well known for his circus portraits and if you look at his photography and Dionne Arbus' side by side there are so many similarities and I love this about great photographers they share so many similarities and yet they are completely different and they make the medium their own Dionne Arbus' photography runs such a wide range of emotions from the almost voyeuristic work of her early days through to the confident and direct photography of the 1960s through to the sort of slightly uneasy and disturbed and almost ethereal work and photography that she was creating just before her suicide Dionne was genuinely drawn to these people the subjects that she photographed and you know you can't just be a voyeur and go into somebody's world take some pictures and leave and end up with the photographs that Dionne Arbus produced over the course of her career you need to have some empathy you need to have interest and the subjects need to feel that you are part of the whole process that you are as much invested in the photographs as they are from a photographer's point of view it helps to see the importance of empathy and feeling like we are part of the process not just an impartial observer that we need to find things that remind us of ourselves within our work especially when photographing people it gives our work a personality and a connection that it would otherwise lack for somebody who just enjoys looking at photographs it's an opening to a world of contemporary art photography that is sometimes difficult to get the point of to understand why you should find these photographs interesting and if you don't find them interesting that's perfectly fine it encourages you to explore and seek out photography that's beyond the norm as it were today 50 years after Dionne Arbus' suicide her photos continue to inspire and influence contemporary art photographers of today one only has to look at the work of Loretta Lux and V. Spears to see similarities and how her work is being taken forward into a completely new direction to see more of these videos and highlights of other famous photographers over the years please subscribe to the channel this is the photographic eye hit that notification bell and you'll be sure to see all these videos that are coming out every Friday thanks ever so much for joining me here today and I look forward to seeing you again soon