Diane Arbus, Photographs, 1956–1971 — Laetitia Barrere

[Summer 2023]

Diane Arbus, Femme portant une voilette sur la 5e Avenue, N.Y. / Woman with veil on Fifth Avenue, N.Y.C., 1968, épreuve à la gélatine argentique / gelatin silver print, tirée par / printed by Neil Selkirk, 51 x 41 cm

By Laetitia Barrere

Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal
15.09.2022 — 29.01.2023

[Excerpt]

The exhibition Diane Arbus: Photographs, 1956–1971 features some one hundred images, selected from a major acquisition of 522 silver gelatin prints by the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2017. Mounted first in Toronto, then in Montreal – after a detour to Denmark – the show offers an opportunity to (re)discover the work of Diane Arbus (1923–71), which had not been shown in Canada for more than thirty years.

The chronological presentation provides an overview of the arc of Arbus’s career and the evolution of her work, which falls into two major periods. The first, from 1956 to 1962, was a time of research and experimentation; during the second, she established herself as an artist. The exhibition curator, Sophie Hackett, set out to link Arbus’s production to the historical context in which she lived. As Hackett notes, when Arbus began to take pictures, photography galleries didn’t exist and choosing to be an art photographer took courage…

[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 123 – THE POWER OF INTIMACY ]
[ Complete article, in digital version, available here: Diane Arbus, Photographs, 1956–1971 — Laetitia Barrere ]