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Book Cover
E-book
Author Gross, Frederick, 1968- author.

Title Diane Arbus's 1960s : auguries of experience / Frederick Gross
Published Minneapolis ; London : University of Minnesota Press, 2012

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Description 1 online resource (xiv, 264 pages)
Contents "Sylvia Plath with a camera" -- Between intention and effect -- Documentary photography and the positivist social gallery -- Portraits, pastiche, and magazine work -- The body in the 1960s -- Madness, disability, and the "untitled" series -- The social panorama in context -- Revelations : darkness and illumination
Summary Gross (art history, Savannah College of Art and Design) goes against the stereotype of New York photographer Diane Arbus as 'Sylvia Plath with a camera' in this examination of Arbus's work within the cultural, literary, and artistic milieu of the 1960s. The author discusses Arbus's portraits, street scenes, images of madness and disability, and her magazine work, including a spread of portraits of children in the magazine Harper's Bazaar, entitled "Auguries of Innocence." Other photographers, artists, and authors under discussion include Robert Frank, Truman Capote, Richard Avedon, Andy Warhol, Roland Barthes, and William Burroughs. The book is for art and photography historians, social and cultural theorists, and lovers of 1960s visual culture. Unfortunately, it contains no photos
In any decade the work of only a very few artists offers a template for understanding the culture and ideas of their time. Photographer Diane Arbus is one of these rare artists, and in this book Frederick Gross returns Arbus's work to the moment in which it was produced and first viewed to reveal its broader significance for analyzing and mapping the culture of the 1960s. While providing a unique view of the social, literary, and artistic context within which Arbus worked, he also, perhaps for the first time anywhere, measures the true breadth and complexity of her achievement. Gross considers Arbus less in terms of her often mythologized biography—a “Sylvia Plath with a camera”—but rather looks at how her work resonates with significant photographic portraiture, art, social currents, theoretical positions, and literature of her times, from Robert Frank and Richard Avedon to Andy Warhol and Truman Capote. He shows how her incandescent photographs seem to literalize old notions of photography as trapping a layer of the subject’s soul within the frame of a picture. For Arbus, “auguries”—as in “Auguries of Innocence,” her 1963 photographic spread in Harper’s Bazaar—conveyed the idea that whoever was present in her photograph could attain legendary status. By shifting critical attention from the myths of Arbus’s biography to the mythmaking of her art, this book gives us a new, informed appreciation of one of the twentieth century’s most important photographers and a better understanding of the world in which she worked. -- Publisher
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Subject Arbus, Diane, 1923-1971 -- Criticism and interpretation
SUBJECT Arbus, Diane, 1923-1971. fast (OCoLC)fst00105852
Arbus, Diane 1923-1971 gnd
Subject Photography -- History -- 20th century
PHOTOGRAPHY -- Criticism.
PHOTOGRAPHY -- Individual Photographers -- Essays.
PHOTOGRAPHY -- Individual Photographers -- Monographs.
PHOTOGRAPHY -- History.
Photography.
Dokumentarfotografie
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
History
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9780816680078
0816680078