Title: Diane Arbus : An Aperture Monograph
Publisher: Aperture, New York
Publication Date: 1972
Binding: Soft cover
Book Condition: Good
Edition: 1st
15, printed pages. 78 full-page black & white photographs, with facing captions. Designed and edited by Doon Arbus and Marvin Israel. First Edition, Second Issue. No photo of two girls in matching raincoats (that was excluded after the first issue). 23.5 x 28 cm. Softbound in original photographic wrappers. Spine slightly age-toned and creased. Hinges very slightly rubbed. Upper cover with photo of twins, creased at lower corner and lightly aged. First Edition paperback simultaneously released with hardcover. Published posthumously, the year after her suicide, and in conjunction with a retrospective show at MOMA, the book was edited and designed by Arbus's daughter Doon and Marvin Israel, one of Arbus's former colleagues at Harpers and Queen. A private student of Lisette Model, Diane Arbus left behind her career as a top fashion photographer and turned her attention to society's oddities and outsiders - twins, dwarves, giants, transvestites, the elderly and lonely. Her accent on these people was in no way mocking; rather, these portraits reveal her fascination with life's tragedies as destinies, and how they test both the individual and society itself. As she describes in some of her writings included as the introduction to this collection: "There is a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairytale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading that they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats." Published in 1972, a year after Arbus's suicide and in conjunction with a retrospective show at the Museum of Modern Art. The museum's photo curator, John Szarkowski, was an early Arbus supporter. but Arbus's place in the public consciousness was sealed largely by Aperture's book; although the first edition is quite uncommon, it has been continually in print to this day. Marvin Israel's spare, almost recessive book lay-out, with pictures on the right-hand page and discreet captions on the left, hasn't lost its punch any more than Arbus's images have lost their power to provoke and disturb. Arbus replaced photography's old model of smarmy humanism with a vision that was once pitiless and engaged, tough and surprisingly tender (Vince Aletti in Roth, et. al., THE BOOK OF 101 BOOKS). Bookseller Inventory # 4313