She is known as the "Vincent Van Gogh of photography". In her photography career, she mostly adopts darker subjects as her creation. Images that are weird, hesitant, incomplete, and even challenging ethics often appear in her photographs. The composition of her works is simple but not lacking in form. Her works have nothing to do with popular beauty but they violently impact our hearts. She has made an in-depth visual exploration of the duality of social mainstream and marginal figures (the poor, freaks, tramps, transgenders, homosexuals, nudists, and mentally retarded people, etc.). She is Diane Arbus (March 14, 1923-July 26, 1971). Her life was full of rebellion and struggle.
Diane Arbus is like a greenhouse flower, growing up with her siblings in a very wealthy American Jewish family and being raised by their respective nanny. However, the lack of direct parental care in this lonely and noble environment not only brought great pressure and pain to her but also made her crazy and distorted attracted by various tragedies. Therefore, Arbus decided to become a "vagrant artist" engaged in street photography and to photograph people who the public finds ugly, weird, and even frightening.
In order to capture the most real and natural expressions and mental states of this group of people, Arbus often touches the lower society. Not only did she walk into crumbling cabins, brothels, transgender hotels, and slave rooms, she also made friends with them and chatted with them. Arbus believes that these people are born with trauma, but after the test of life, they still live tenaciously and truthfully. She wants to use this extremely profound way to remove their masks and to take pictures of real "normality in deformity, deformity in normality".
All maverick artists have to pay a certain price for their paranoia. The images that can be allowed in today's society, but are a symbol of dirty and corruption in the 1965 era. The acrimonious mainstream evaluation, long-term exposure to the distorted side of darkness, and her own depression, finally made Arbus's mind and body completely destroyed in 1971. She committed suicide by cutting her wrists to leave the world that did not understand her at that time. The last word she left in her diary was "The Last Supper", but no one knew what she meant.
Unexpectedly, Arbus, who was unknown and even attacked during her lifetime, became famous only a year after her death. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City held the first major retrospective of Arbus' work in 1972. To date, retrospectives have attracted the highest attendance of any exhibition in MoMA history. In the review of the exhibition "Diane Arbus Revelations", Michael Kimmelman stated that Diane Arbus's memorable work not only changed the art of photography but also gave new dignity to the forgotten and neglected.
About this world, there are many things that make people puzzled. The existence of photography is not only to turn beauty into eternity but sometimes it is more responsible for documenting alternative unreality. Diane Arbus's photos seem to be telling the world that anything has never been familiar to ordinary people. Groups of freaks also have higher moral standards and dignity. And the reason why she will stay in the history forever is that she let people think about normality and abnormality, morality and immorality, justice and injustice, respect and violation, as well as fate and tragedy through the objects she photographed.