Diane arbus

Diane arbus

Diane Nemerov was born in 1923 in New York City. Her father owned a fashionable Fifth Avenue department store called Russeks. His wife, Gertrude Russeks', family founded it and it is now defunct. The family lived in an apartment on Central Park West as they were comfortably wealthy. They were a very prosperous family which lead to Diane's sheltered childhood. She was educated at the Fieldstone and Ethical Culture schools which were very progressive institutes. This meant an overly protective, overly organized childhood during which she broke the monotony and boredom by being naughty. She defied the security provided by her family and school by doing the don't-do's.
Diane's paternal grandfather, Meyer Nemerov left his native Russia after defying his parents' wishes and marrying his sweetheart and not the girl his orthodox Jewish family had picked for him. When Diane was 13 years old she met Allan Arbus, during high school she carried on a secret affair with him against her parent's wishes. They were married less than a month after her eighteenth birthday. He was nineteen. It was Allan Arbus, who introduced Diane to photography. During World War II, he was trained at the Signal Corps photography school at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. Each night when he returned home, he would teach Diane what he had learned in a makeshift darkroom set up in their bathroom. After the war and sampling other careers, they both worked in the fashion industry as photographers. Their first account was for Diane's father's store. They went on to become a successful photographic team for almost 20 years. They had two daughters together, Doon and Amy.

In 1957 she realized that there was more to life and photography than helping Allan do his thing. She began to understand that a woman could have her own photographic style and do her own work. She was very relieved by this realization. Diane's artistic career initiated in 1959 when she started studying photography with Lisette Model. It was also during the summer of 1959 that Diane and Allan ceased living together. After the dissolution of her marriage, Diane embarked on a wild, erotic quest to rejoin humanity. With her new and innovative style, Diane received the Guggenheim fellowship in 1963 as well as in '66. Arbus' work had been exhibited in New York's Museum of Modern Art in the 1967 "New Documents" photography show. After that exhibit, she began teaching photography at various schools including the Parsons School of Design in New York and Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. Allan became an actor and starred as Dr. Sydney Friedman on the hit TV show M*A*S*H. He was also in movies, for example "The Christian Licorice Store" in 1971 and "The Electric Horseman" in 1979.

Diane Arbus took her own life on July 26, 1971, by ingesting a...

To view the complete essay, you be registered.