Frederick Gross
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816670116
- eISBN:
- 9781452946467
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816670116.001.0001
- Subject:
- Art, Photography
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 this book returns ...
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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 this book 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, this book also measures the true breadth and complexity of her achievement. The book 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. It 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.Less
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 this book 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, this book also measures the true breadth and complexity of her achievement. The book 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. It 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.
Vittoria C. Caratozzolo
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816675784
- eISBN:
- 9781452946337
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816675784.003.0015
- Subject:
- Art, Visual Culture
This chapter opens with the story of Bettina Ballard, an American journalist for Vogue, who arrived in Rome in 1944 after serving as a Red Cross volunteer in North Africa. Once in Rome, despite the ...
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This chapter opens with the story of Bettina Ballard, an American journalist for Vogue, who arrived in Rome in 1944 after serving as a Red Cross volunteer in North Africa. Once in Rome, despite the fact that it was still far from the fashionable city it would later become, the few outfits she had brought along immediately seemed démodé; they had lost their initial glamour. It considers the reasons why Ballard suddenly felt the need to update her wardrobe. The chapter also describes Harper’s Bazaar fashion editor Diana Vreeland’s discovery of “pagan sandals” during a summer trip to Capri in the mid-1930s; and the immense popularity of Italian-made shoes in the postwar years.Less
This chapter opens with the story of Bettina Ballard, an American journalist for Vogue, who arrived in Rome in 1944 after serving as a Red Cross volunteer in North Africa. Once in Rome, despite the fact that it was still far from the fashionable city it would later become, the few outfits she had brought along immediately seemed démodé; they had lost their initial glamour. It considers the reasons why Ballard suddenly felt the need to update her wardrobe. The chapter also describes Harper’s Bazaar fashion editor Diana Vreeland’s discovery of “pagan sandals” during a summer trip to Capri in the mid-1930s; and the immense popularity of Italian-made shoes in the postwar years.
