PRINT May 1971

Five Photographs by Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus

A boy wearing a straw boater and “Bomb Hanoi” pin stares blankly from the cover of Artforum’s May 1971 edition, the unlikely messenger of old news: Photography can be art. The woman behind the camera is Diane Arbus, the polarizing talent whose portfolio A box of ten photographs—excerpted in that historic issue—represented a turning point for the medium while distilling the fraught intersubjectivity of Arbus’s world, whose soulful visions remain wondrously immune from total understanding. As she wrote, “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.”

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