About Book
Untitled is the only volume of Diane Arbus' work devoted exclusively to a single project. The photographs were taken at residences for the mentally retarded between 1969 and 1971, in the last years of Arbus' life. Although she considered making a book on the subject, the vast majority of these pictures have remained unpublished until now. These photographs achieve a lyricism and an emotional purity that sets them apart from all her other accomplishments: "Finally what I've been searching for," she wrote at the time. The product of her consistently unflinching regard for reality as she found it, Untitled may well be Arbus' most transcendent, most romantic vision. It is a celebration of the singularity and connectedness of each and every one of us, and demands of us what it demanded of her: the courage to see things as they are and the grace to permit them to simply be. For Diane Arbus, this is what making pictures was all about. Untitled includes an afterword by Doon Arbus, the photographer's daughter, who writes that the intent of these works wasn't. about who or what she saw, but about the experience of seeing it and the power of her photographs to make that experience visible.
About Author
Diane Arbus (March 14, 1923 – July 26, 1971) was an American photographer and writer noted for black-and-white square photographs of "deviant and marginal people (dwarfs, giants, transgender people, nudists, circus performers) or of people whose normality seems ugly or surreal.". Arbus believed that a camera could be “a little bit cold, a little bit harsh” but its scrutiny revealed the truth; the difference between what people wanted others to see and what they really did see – the flaws. A friend said that Arbus said that she was "afraid . . . that she would be known simply as 'the photographer of freaks' however, that phrase has been used repeatedly to describe her. 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.