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APERTURE
Diane Arbus: Untitled
Afterword by Doon Arbus.
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 Although she considered making a book on the subject, the vast majority of these pictures have remained unpublished until now.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.”
Featured image, Untitled, 1971, is reproduced from Aperture's Diane Arbus: Untitled.
FROM THE BOOK
"In her Untitled series, with its unique concentration on aspects of a single subject that seemed at least for a time, inexhaustible, Diane Arbus may have found her most transcendent and consistently romantic vision. These images--created out of the courage to see things as they are, the grace to permit them simply to be, and a deceptive simplicity that permits itself neither fancy nor artifice--show us metaphors embodied in the facts, riddles without words or answers, fragments of an unwritten fairy tale. They are revelatory rather than didactic, but their very existence seems proof that nthing conjured by the imagination could be as awesome or exhilarating or magical or baffling as an encounter with reality. The photographs appear to be documents of a world we've never seen or imagined before--one with its own rituals and icons, its own games and fashions and codes of conduct--which, for all its strangeness, is at the same time hauntingly familiar, and, in the end, no more or less unfathomable than or own."
Doon Arbus, excerpted from the afterword to Untitled.
FORMAT: Hbk, 11 x 14 in. / 112 pgs / 51 duotone. LIST PRICE: U.S. $75.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $90 ISBN: 9781597111904 PUBLISHER: Aperture AVAILABLE: 9/30/2011 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: No longer our product AVAILABILITY: Not Available
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.”
