Photography

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Colegiul National “Mihai Viteazul” Ploiesti

Student: Sicaru Iuliana Andreea Coordinating teacher: Ilie Liliana

Student: Sicaru Iuliana Andreea Coordinating teacher: Ilie Liliana

Foreword
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“Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever... it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.” – Aaron Siskind. This quote is suggestive for my choice. Photography is such a big part of our lives nowadays, but sometimes we forget how delicate of an art it is. There are many reasons I have chosen to talk about photography and the photographers that made from this hobby a successful career. These photographers succeeded in transforming reality into something magic, which makes them so worth telling their stories. Firstly, through photography they have shown us the past. The way people used to live, the yet untouched nature, which will remain in people’s memory forever. Those photos that catch all these amazing moments are worth more than thousands words. Secondly, in pictures, the photographers made us see their world through their eyes. I love the feelings of a sunset or a sunrise, the mystery of a land covered in fog, vanishing with a sense of illusion, the feeling of a drop in the ocean when seeing one of the Ansel Adam’s pictures. Thirdly, photography is an art that speaks for itself. I admire Dorothea Lange’s photos because they are full of emotions. I look at any person in her photos and for a moment I feel what they were feeling in the second the picture was taken. I glance at any face and I see all the pain and suffering that those Japanese have endured. Just for an instant I get to walk through their lives. Moreover, capturing moments of nowadays’ society can be an important history resource for next generations. They can see how we used to live and the differences between us and their upgraded, superior society. This is the way Edward Curtis became a well-known photographer. He took photos of a long time ago disappeared generation, the American Natives. Through Curtis’ vision of that culture, we have a proof of their mysterious past, their various avocations, and their hunting customs, which will remain a magnificent document of a proud generation.
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Last but not least, I find the way Diane Arbus expressed herself in her art, astonishing and courageous. The unique and brave point of view regarding the disabled people makes us appreciate more our health and be more thankful for our lives. Beside this, through the means of photography we can stare at these imperfections without being blamed or judged. All in all I have chosen to speak about photography because it can express feelings better than words and in such a good way that you feel overwhelmed and anxious to see and feel more. Also, photography can immortalize an instant of time and hold it still forever, which makes it so special to me.

Tabel of Contents
1. Introduction …………………………………………...5 2. Ansel Adams ………………………………………….6 2.1. Starting a new life ……………………….6 2.2 . Photographic career ……………………..7 2.3. Writings …………………………………..8 2.4. Death and legacy ………………………...8 3. Dorothea Lange .………………………………….. …...9
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3.1. Personal life . …………………………...…9 3.2. Life work ……….…………………….. …9 3.3. Migrant Mother ………………………….10 3.4. The JapaneseAmericans ………………10 3.5. Death and legacy ……………………….11 4. Edward ……………………………………….12 4.1. Personal …………………………….12 4.2. The Native ………………….13 4.3. Retouched ………………………13 Curtis life Americans Photos

5. Diane Arbus …………………………………………..15 5.1. Early career as fashion photographer……..15 5.2. Photographic choice………………………16 5.3. Making a ‘candid’ career ………………...16 5.4. Death and legacy …………………………17
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6. Bibliography …18

……………………………………..

1. Introduction

“Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever... it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.” – Aaron Siskind

Photography is the process, activity and art of creating still or moving pictures by recording radiation on a sensitive medium, such as a photographic film, or an electronic sensor. The word "photograph" was coined in 1839 by Sir John Herschel and is based on the Greek photos (light) and graphé (representation) by means of lines" or "drawing", together meaning "drawing with light". Traditionally, the products of photography have been called negatives and photographs, commonly shortened to photos. Photography has many uses for business, science, art, and pleasure. Photography gained the interest of many scientists and artists from its inception. Scientists have used photography to record and study movements, such as Eadweard Muybridge's study of human and animal locomotion in 1887. Artists are equally interested by these aspects but also try to explore avenues other than the photo-mechanical representation of reality, such as the pictorialist movement. Military, police, and security forces use photography for surveillance, recognition and data storage. Photography is used by amateurs to preserve memories of favorite times, to capture special moments, to tell stories, to send messages, and as a source of entertainment. The ‘camera obscura’ (latin for dark chamber) it is literally a dark room or a box with a small hole in one wall. An inverted image from outside the hole would appear on the opposite wall. This device could thus be used to aid drawing (artist could trace the outline of the image on a canvas hung on the wall) and was considered quite significant in the development of proto-photography. Photography is the result of combining several technical discoveries. Long before the first photographs were made, Chinese philosopher Mo Di described a pinhole camera in the 5th century B.C.E. 6

Invented in the first decades of the nineteenth century, photography (by way of the camera) seemed able to capture more detail and information than traditional mediums, such as painting and sculpting. If we take a look at the state of photography today, such as the advances of digital camera, artful image manipulation by photoshop, and even the role of paparazzi in media – and the pervasiveness of photographic images in our lives, it is easy to forget that the first photograph ever was taken just 180 years ago. The development of photography was quite fast: since Niépce took the world’s first photograph in 1826, it took only about 30 years for photograph became a product for mass consumption .

2.

Ansel Adams

“I can look at a fine art photograph and sometimes I can hear music.” - Ansel Adams

Ansel Easton Adams (February 20, 1902 – April 22, 1984) was an American photographer and environmentalist, best known for his black-and-white photographs of the American West, especially in Yosemite National Park. Ansel Adams, the only child of Charles and Olive Adams was born in San Fransisco, California. Due to an earthquake that occurred in 1906, he was thrown to the floor and he got a broken nose. This made him a very shy and reserved child. He was extremely self-conscious about his nose and as a result faced lots of problems in school. Thus, after receiving eighth-grade education, he preferred to learn mainly by following his own intuitions. At the age of twelve, he started playing the piano. Due to his serious interest in music, he decided to pursue a career as a concert pianist. 2.1.

Starting a new life

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In 1916, he was on a family trip to Yosemite National Park. Here, he took his first photograph with his amateur camera. This incident reportedly made him embrace photography as a career:“I tried to keep both arts alive, but the camera won. I found that while the camera does not express the soul, perhaps a photograph can!” He then found a job as a photo technician in a commercial firm, where he got to learn a lot about his new hobby. He spent sometime working as a caretaker in the Sierra Club. During his twenties, most of his friends came from musical connections, particularly violinist and amateur photographer Cedric Wright, who became his best friend as well as his philosophical and cultural mentor. Their shared philosophy came from Edward Carpenter’s Towards Democracy, a literary work which espoused the pursuit of beauty in life and art. Adams always carried a pocket edition with him while at Yosemite. It soon became his personal philosophy as well, as Adams later stated: “I believe in beauty. I believe in stones and water, air and soil, people and their future and their fate.” He decided that the purpose of his art from now on, whether photography or music, was to reveal that beauty to others and to inspire them to the same calling. In summer, Adams would enjoy a life of hiking, camping, and photographing, and the rest of the year he worked to improve his piano playing, expanding his piano technique and musical expression. He also gave piano lessons to make some income, finally affording a grand piano suitable to his musical ambitions. He met his wife Virginia Best also in Yosemite, and later went on and married her in 1928. They later had two children, Michael and Anne.

2.2.

Photographic career

In 1927 his first portfolio was published, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras, which included his famous image Monolith, the vertical western face of Half Dome. On that excursion, he had only one plate left and he “visualized” the effect of the blackened sky before risking the last shot. As he stated, “I had been able to realize a desired image: not the way the subject appeared in reality but how it felt to me and how it must appear in the finished print”. The following year he began to work as an official photographer for the Sierra Club. In 1930 Taos Pueblo, Adams's second portfolio, was published with text by writer Mary Austin. Adams’s talkative, high-spirited nature combined with his excellent piano playing made him a hit within his enlarging circle of elite artist friends, such as the painter Georgia 8

O’Keeffe, artist John Marin, and photographer Paul Strand. Strand especially proved influential, sharing secrets of his technique with Adams, and finally convincing Adams to pursue photography with all his talent and energy. Adams was able to put on his first solo museum exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution in 1931, featuring 60 prints taken in the High Sierra. He received an excellent review from the Washington Post, “His photographs are like portraits of the giant peaks, which seem to be inhabited by mythical gods." Despite his success, Adams felt he was not yet up to the standards of Strand. He decided to broaden his subject matter to include still life and close-up photos, and to achieve higher quality by “visualizing” each image before taking it. Between 1929 and 1942, Adams’s work matured and he became more established. In the course of his 60-year career, the 1930s were a particularly productive and experimental time. Adams expanded his works, focusing on detailed close-ups as well as large forms from mountains to factories. Adams founded the Group f/64 along with fellow photographers Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham, which in turn created the Museum of Modern Art's department of photography. The group’s manifesto stated that “Pure photography is defined as possessing no qualities of technique, composition or idea, derivative of any other art form”. In September 1941, Adams contracted with the Department of the Interior to make photographs of National Parks, Indian reservations, and other locations for use as mural-sized prints for decoration of the Department’s new building. Part of his understanding with the Department was that he might also make photographs for his own use, using his own film and processing. In 1948, Adams began five years of important work, photographing a variety of national park locations and monuments. In 1950 he went to Alaska, Hawaii and Maine, and issued a number of superb portfolios. In 1955 he moved back to Yosemite, where he began a photography workshop. His Portfolio 3: Yosemite Valley was published by the Sierra Club in 1960. In 1974, Adams had a major retrospective exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Much of his time during the 1970s was spent curating and re-printing negatives from his vault, in part to satisfy the great demand of art museums which had finally created departments of photography and desired his iconic works. He also devoted his considerable writing skills and prestige to the cause of environmentalism, focusing particularly on the Big Sur coastline of California and the protection of Yosemite from over-use. President Jimmy Carter commissioned Adams to make the first official portrait of a president made by a photograph.

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2.3. Writings
He always believed in sharing his knowledge, thus he taught and lectured, as well as worked on advertising assignments in San Francisco area. Somewhere in the 1930s, Adams started extensively publishing about the different techniques of photography and stressed on the importance of careful craftsmanship in this field. Adams also advocated the idea of visualization (which he often called ‘previsualization’, though he later acknowledged that term to be a redundancy) whereby the final image is “seen” in the mind’s eye before taking the photo, toward the goal of achieving all together the aesthetic, intellectual, spiritual, and mechanical effects desired. He taught these and other techniques to thousands of amateur photographers through his publications and his workshops. His many books about photography, including the Morgan & Morgan Basic Photo Series (The Camera, The Negative, The Print, Natural Light Photography, and Artificial Light Photography) have become classics in the field. He later moved to Yosemite Valley and began publishing a lot of volumes that included: The John Muir Trail (1938), Illustrated Guide to Yosemite Valley (1940), Yosemite and the High Sierra (1948), and My Camera in Yosemite Valley (1949). Adams' technical books on photography, which includes Making a Photograph, the Basic Photo Series as well as the Polaroid Land Photography Manual, were also very useful and popular.

2.4. Death and legacy
Ansel Adams died on April 22, 1984, at the age of 82 from heart failure aggravated by cancer. He was survived by his wife, two children (Michael and Anne) and five grandchildren. His lasting legacy includes helping to elevate photography to an art comparable with painting and music, and equally capable of expressing emotion and beauty. As he reminded his students, “It is easy to take a photograph, but it is harder to make a masterpiece in photography than in any other art medium”. Ansel Adams received a number of awards during his lifetime and posthumously, and there have been a few awards named for him.

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3.

Dorothea Lange

“One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind.”Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange (May 26, 1895 – October 11, 1965) was an influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depressionera work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Born in New Jersey Dorothea Lange was named Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn at birth. She dropped her middle name and assumed her mother's maiden name after her father abandoned the family, one of two traumatic incidents in her early life. The other was her contraction of polio at age seven which left her lame throughout her life. Like many other polio victims before treatment was available, she emerged with a weakened right leg, and a permanent limp.

3.1. Personal Life
Lange was educated in photography in New York City. She was informally apprenticed to several New York photography studios. In 1918, she moved to San Francisco, and by the following year she had opened a successful portrait studio. She lived across the bay in Berkeley for the rest of her life. In 1920, she married the noted western painter Maynard Dixon, with whom she had two sons. They were married for 15 years – a union of two exceptionally talented, fiercely independent individuals. That was not an easy relationship. Yet, in terms of personal and artistic development, it was a crucial one. Paul Taylor was a professor of agricultural economics at UC Berkley when he met Lange, and the two connected immediately. Taylor hired Lange to work with him on a project for the State 11

Emergency Relief Administration, documenting the plight of the migrant workers now streaming into California. Their philosophical connection soon became an emotional one, and they embarked on a personal and professional relationship that would last until Lange’s death. Together they documented in rural poverty and the exploitation of sharecroppers and migrant laborers — Taylor interviewing and gathering economic data, Lange taking photos.

3.2. Life work
Dorothea was fiercely independent. Instead of becoming a teacher as her mother wanted, she went uptown to the studio of a famous portrait photographer, Arnold Genthe, and asked him for a job. She was hired, and her life's work began. She learned how to set up a camera and studio lights, met many rich and famous people, and studied the artistry with which Genthe portrayed people: he didn't just snap their picture; he seemed to make the camera understand the people. This sense that an understanding of a subject was essential in making a portrait was truly the artistic part of photography, and something that Dorothea would take with her for the rest of her career. With the onset of the Great Depression, Lange turned her camera lens from the studio to the street. Her studies of unemployed and homeless people captured the attention of local photographers and led to her employment with the federal Resettlement Administration (RA), later called the Farm Security Administration (FSA). She would walk into camps, where homeless pea-pickers and refugees of the Oklahoma dust bowl were scraping by, sometimes starving to death, and talk to them until they felt comfortable enough to have their pictures taken. Her limp, she thought, created an instant rapport between herself and her subjects. She said that people trusted her more because she didn't appear "whole and secure" in the face of their poverty and insecurity.

3.3. Migrant Mother
Although she got her start and made most of her money taking portraits of wealthy people, Lange preferred the deeper challenge of photographing the real human condition. Wherever there was social upheaval, or quiet suffering, Lange was there with a compassionate eye to record and report. Lange's best-known picture is titled "Migrant Mother." The woman in the photo is Florence 12

Owens Thompson. The original photo featured Florence's thumb and index finger on the tent pole, but the image was later retouched to hide Florence's thumb. Her index finger was left untouched (lower right in photo). Lange spoke about her experience taking the photograph: “I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.”

3.4. The Japanese-Americans
In 1941, Lange was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for excellence in photography. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, she gave up the prestigious award to record the forced evacuation of Japanese Americans to relocation camps, on assignment for the War Relocation Authority (WRA). Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, she took heartrending pictures of the Japanese families as they were evacuated from their homes and sent to prison camps. She was disgusted that the government would lock people up not because of anything they had done, but solely because of their Japanese blood. She recorded the San Francisco shipyard workers, taking advantage of the war and the need for ship-builders to make their first real wages since the depression began. She covered the rounding up of Japanese Americans and their internment in relocation camps, highlighting Manzanar, the first of the permanent internment camps. To many observers, her photograph of Japanese-American children pledging allegiance to the flag shortly before they were sent to internment camps is a haunting reminder of this policy of detaining people without charging them with any crime or affording them any appeal.

3.5. Death and legacy
In the last two decades of her life, Lange's health was poor. She suffered from gastric problems, including bleeding ulcers, as well as post-polio syndrome — although this renewal of the pain and weakness of polio was not yet recognized by most physicians. 13

Lange died of esophageal cancer on October 11, 1965, age 70.[4][9] She was survived by her second husband, Paul Taylor, two children, three stepchildren, and numerous grandchildren and greatgrandchildren. In 1972 the Whitney Museum used 27 of Lange's photographs in an exhibit entitled Executive Order 9066. This exhibit highlighted the Japanese Internment during World War II. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver announced on May 28, 2008 that Lange will be inducted into the California Hall of Fame, located at The California Museum for History, Women and the Arts. The induction ceremony took place on December 15 and her son accepted the honor in her place.

4. Eduard Curtis

“Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.”- Berenice Abbott

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Edward Sheriff Curtis (February 16, 1868 – October 19, 1952) was a photographer of the American West and of Native American peoples. Edward Curtis was born near Whitewater, Wisconsin. In 1885 at the age of seventeen Edward became an apprentice photographer in St. Paul, Minnesota. In 1887 the family moved to Seattle, Washington, where Edward purchased a new camera and became a partner in an existing photographic studio with Rasmus Rothi. Curtis dropped out of school in the sixth grade. He soon built his own camera.

4.1 Personal Life
In 1892 Edward married Clara J. Phillips. Together they had four children. In 1896 the entire family moved to a new house in Seattle. In 1910 the family was living in Seattle, when Clara filed for divorce. In 1919 she was granted the divorce and received the Curtis' photographic studio and all of his original camera negatives as her part of the settlement. Edward went with his daughter, Beth, to the studio and destroyed all of his original glass negatives, rather than have them become the property of his ex-wife, Clara. In 1920 Beth Curtis and her sister Florence Curtis were living in a boarding house in Seattle. Around 1922 Curtis moved to Los Angeles with his daughter Beth, and opened a new photo studio. To earn money he worked as an assistant cameraman for Cecil B. DeMille and was an uncredited assistant cameraman in the 1923 filming of The Ten Commandments. On October 16, 1924 Curtis sold the rights to his ethnographic motion picture In the Land of the Head-Hunters to the American Museum of Natural History. He was paid $1,500 for the master print and the original camera negative. It had cost him over $20,000 to film. In 1927 after returning from Alaska to Seattle with his daughter Beth, he was arrested for failure to pay alimony over the preceding 7 years. The total owed was $4,500, but the charges were dropped. For Christmas of 1927, the family was reunited at daughter Florence's home in Medford, Oregon. This was the first time since the divorce that Curtis was with all of his children at the same time, and it had been thirteen years since he had seen Katherine. In 1928, desperate for cash, Edward sold the rights to his project to J.P Morgan's son. In 1930 he published the concluding volume of The North American Indian. In total about 280 sets were sold of his now completed opus magnum. 15

4.2. The Native Americans
In 1895 Curtis met and photographed Princess Angeline (18001896) aka Kickisomlo, the daughter of Chief Sealth of Seattle. This was to be his first portrait of a Native American. In 1906 J.P. Morgan offered Curtis $75,000 to produce a series on the North American Indian. It was to be in 20 volumes with 1,500 photographs. Morgan was to receive 25 sets and 500 original prints as his method of repayment. 222 complete sets were eventually published. Curtis' goal was not just to photograph, but to document, as much American Indian (Native American) traditional life as possible before that way of life disappeared. He wrote in the introduction to his first volume in 1907: "The information that is to be gathered ... respecting the mode of life of one of the great races of mankind, must be collected at once or the opportunity will be lost." Curtis made over 10,000 wax cylinder recordings of Indian language and music. He took over 40,000 photographic images from over 80 tribes. He recorded tribal lore and history, and he described traditional foods, housing, garments, recreation, ceremonies, and funeral customs. He wrote biographical sketches of tribal leaders, and his material, in most cases, is the only recorded history.

4.3. Retouched Photos
Curtis has been praised as a gifted photographer but also criticized by professional ethnologists for manipulating his images. Curtis' photographs have been charged with misrepresenting Native American people and cultures by portraying them in the popular notions and stereotypes of the times. Although the early twentieth century was a difficult time for most Native communities in America, not all natives were doomed to becoming a "vanishing race". At a time when natives' rights were being denied and their treaties were unrecognized by the federal government, many natives were successfully adapting to western society. By reinforcing the native identity as the noble savage and a tragic vanishing race, some believe Curtis detracted attention from the true plight of American natives at the time when he was witnessing their squalid conditions on reservations first-hand and their attempt to find their place in Western culture and adapt to their changing world. In 16

many of his images Curtis removed parasols, suspenders, wagons, and other traces of Western and material culture from his pictures. He also is known to have paid natives to pose in staged scenes, wear historically inaccurate dress and costumes, dance and partake in simulated ceremonies.

In the unretouched image above, we can see the clock between Little Plume and Yellow Kidney. On October 19, 1952, at the age of 84, Curtis died of a heart attack in Whittier, California in the home of his daughter, Beth. He was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Hollywood Hills, California.

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5. Diane Arbus

“I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them.” – Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus (March 14, 1923 – July 26, 1971) was an American photographer. She was born, to a wealthy Jewish family, in 1923 as Diane Nemerov. Because of the family's wealth, Arbus led a pampered childhood. Being a member of a prominent New York family, she grew up with a strong sense of what was "acceptable" and what was "prohibited" in polite society. Her world was a protected one in which she never felt adversity, yet it seemed to her to be an unreal world. At the age of 13, she met Allan Arbus, an employee in the advertising department of her parents' store, and they married, with her parents' grudging assent, after she turned 18. heir first daughter Doon (who would later become a writer) was born in 1945 and their second daughter Amy (who would later become a photographer) was born in 1954.

5.1. Early career as fashion photographer
The Arbuses were both interested in photography. In 1941 they visited the gallery of Alfred Steiglitz, where Diane learned about photographers such as Matthew Brady, Timothy O'Sullivan, Paul Strand, Bill Brandt, and Eugene Atget. In the early 1940s Diane's father employed them to take photographs for the department store's advertisements. During World War II when Allan was sent to a photography school near Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, Arbus moved to nearby Red Bank and set up a darkroom in their bathroom. Allan taught her everything he was learning at the school. In 1946, after the war, the Arbuses began a commercial photography business called "Diane & Allan Arbus," with Diane as art director and Allan as the photographer. They contributed to Glamour, 18

Seventeen, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and other magazines even though "they both hated the fashion world." Despite over 200 pages of their fashion editorial in Glamour, and over 80 pages in Vogue, the Arbuses' fashion photography has been described as of "middling quality." In 1957 the couple decided to make a change. He continued to run their fashion studio, freeing her to photograph subjects of her own choice. She briefly attended Alexey Brodovitch's workshop at the New School and, on her own, made a detailed study of the history of photography. But Arbus found herself most drawn to the photographs of her contemporaries Louis Faurer and Robert Frank and, especially, to the unusual images of Lisette Model. She began photographing on assignment for magazines such as Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, and The Sunday Times Magazine in 1959.

5.2. Photographic choice
In 1958 Arbus enrolled in a class Model was offering at the New School.It was during this period of work with Model that Arbus decided what she really wanted to photograph was "the forbidden." She saw her camera as a sort of license that allowed her to be curious and to explore the lives of others. Gradually overcoming her shyness, she enjoyed going where she never had, entering the lives and homes of others and confronting that which had been off-limits in her own protected childhood. In the 1960s she began to explore the subjects that would occupy her for much of her career: individuals living on the outskirts of society and "normalcy" (such as nudists, transvestites, dwarfs, the mentally or physically handicapped and dead or dying people) or else of people whose normality seems ugly or surreal. A friend declared that Arbus said that she was "afraid... of being known simply as 'the photographer of freaks'"; however, that term has been used repeatedly to describe her. "Freaks was a thing I photographed a lo," she wrote,“Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats.” “Model” taught her to be specific, that close scrutiny of reality produces something fantastic. An early project Arbus undertook involved photographing what she referred to as "freaks." She responded to them with a mixture of shame and awe. She always identified with her subjects in a personal way. Instead of looking away from such people, as does most of the public, Arbus looked directly at these individuals, 19

treating them seriously and humanely. As a result, her work was always original and unique.

5.3. Making a ‘candid’ career
When Arbus and her husband separated in 1960, her work became increasingly independent. During that period she began her series of circus images, photographing midget clowns, tattooed men, and sideshow subjects. She frequented Hubert's Freak Museum at Broadway and 42nd Street, fascinated by what she saw. She returned again and again until her subjects knew and trusted her. She also frequented the Times Square area, getting to know the bag ladies and derelicts. Arbus posed her subjects looking directly into the camera, just as she looked directly at them. She said, "I don't like to arrange things; I arrange myself." For her, the subject was always more important than the picture. She firmly believed that there were things which nobody would see unless she photographed them. In the early 1960s Arbus began to photograph another group, nudists. She frequented nudist camps in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, agreeing to go naked herself in order to gain her subjects' trust. Diane also taught photography at the Parsons School of Design and the Cooper Union in New York City, and the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island. This period, 1962 to 1964, was a particularly productive one for her. Among Arbus' many accomplishments during this time was winning her first Guggenheim fellowship, which allowed her to photograph "American rites and customs, contests, festivals. … " The first major exhibition of her photographs occurred at the Museum of Modern Art in a 1967 show called "New Documents"

5.4. Death and legacy
From 1966 on Arbus struggled with bouts of hepatitis which often left her weak and depressed. On July 26, 1971. Arbus took her own life by ingesting barbiturates and slashing her wrists with a razor. In 1972, a year after she committed suicide, Arbus became the first American photographer to have photographs displayed at the Venice Biennale. Millions of people viewed traveling exhibitions of her work in 1972-1979. In 2003-2006, Arbus and her work were the subjects of a another major traveling exhibition, Diane Arbus Revelations. A national touring exhibit by the Museum of Modern Art and a book of her photographs by Aperture magazine made her one of the most famous fine art photographers in the U.S. Her most famous photos 20

include Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C., 1962 and Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J., 1967.An original print of Identical Twins sold for $478,400 in 2004. In 2001-2004 the 1972 book was selected as one of the most important photobooks in history. Over 300,000 copies of the book had been sold by 2004, which is unusual since "independent" photobooks are normally produced in editions of less than 5,000. In 2006, the motion picture Fur, starring Nicole Kidman as Arbus, presented a fictional version of her life story. In many respects Arbus embodies the major elements of much that was happening in photography in the mid-20th century. She was a photojournalist; but, introspective to a fault, was also photographing herself while ostensibly photographing others. Her most bizarre subjects at first sight often provoke a sequential reaction: gawking, followed by an attempt to come to terms with what one has just done.

Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C., 1962

Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J., 1967

6. Bibliography

http://www.photoquotes.com
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http://www.anseladams.com http://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothea_Lange http://www.myhero.com/go/hero.asp?hero=d_lange http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Curtis http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award98/ienhtml/curthome.html http://www.andrewsmithgallery.com/exhibitions/western/edwardcurtis.html http://www.photography.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photography http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diane_Arbus http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/arbus.html http://www.answers.com/topic/diane-arbus http://www.worldwisdom.com/public/authors/Edward-Curtis.aspx

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