The selection of her photographs is comprehensive and well organized as you would expect from her estate which owns them all. No doubt the Fraenkel Gallery near SFMOMA had a lot to do with the quality of the show and book. Read it before you attend the show and you will learn a lot even if you've never heard of her.

Coupled with the detailed chronology of her life, the images give a clear picture of a character which has been obscured by mythology and rumor for 30 years. I am not a fan of Diane Arbus (and certainly not a detractor) but I gained a lot of respect for her as an artist as I read her notes and quotes about her own work.
If you are looking for a biography of a brave young woman artist in the mid-twentieth century, this one is good. It is thorough and not editorialized with adjulation. The only gratuitious facts that I would have left out are the cold details of her death in the coroner's reports at the end of the book. Yet I get the impression this is the way she would have wanted it. This is the book she would have written. Absent some equal scholarship to the contrary, this is the truth about Diane Arbus.


Revealing, revalatory   November 18, 2003
 47 out of 49 found this review helpful

I own two Arbus monographs and have lived with them for over 20 years. Many of those works are reproduced in this volume. There is a lot of talk about "the human condition" and I suppose all artists in one way or another wrestle with the notion. Arbus has always meant to me someone who seemed to reveal who we are beneath the fashion, the roles, the sex, the culture. I used one of her images as a means to illuminate a poster for a Sam Shepard play called Icarus' Mother - it was of a very young New York boy holding a toy hand grenade in a threatening way during play in Central Park - once seen never forgotten.
Nor will I forget her self portrait, naked pregnant, in this latest volume. So much. So much. This is the volume Arbus lovers have been waiting for. Printed in Germany, beautifully bound, positively packed with images, diary entries, extracts from letters, comment. A bargain.


Warning! For hard-core Arbus fans only   June 13, 2004
 22 out of 26 found this review helpful

I enjoy Diane Arbus' photos, but this book is too much for me. Her photos are only a small part of the book -- the majority of the book is a catalogue of her life. The contact sheets are quite interesting, as they reveal a lot about how she approached a subject. The rest will likely appeal only to hardcore Arbus fans.


A brilliant tribute to a great artist   August 5, 2004
 16 out of 17 found this review helpful

Diane Arbus was best-known for her stark, black-and-white photographs of the outer fringes of society. She was very much of her time period, since the things she had to go outside of the lines to photograph (inter-racial couples, people with tattoos, drag queens, etc.) are now a part of every day life. I was fortunate enough to see a display of her work at the L.A. County Museum of Art, and this volume is a wonderful companion to the show. Not only are all the plates from the show included, but also copies of correspondence, pictures of her cameras, and the story of her sad, short life. In many ways, she was ahead of her time, with the un-smiling, un-flattering portraits of real people, at a time when most photography was glossy, and reality was still somewhat hidden.

Like most brilliant artists, she was troubled and was not happy with her life. She took her life at a relatively young age, before she could see the modern world, reflected from her early photographs. It is a pity, but we are lucky to have the photographs of Diane Arbus live on.


An Apt Title!   October 15, 2003
 14 out of 15 found this review helpful

The first book I ever saw that made me realize photographs were more than family snapshots was Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph. For years I've wondered about the woman who took those photographs and how she worked...from getting her subjects to pose for her, to how she developed and processed her film, and also about her life. Revelations provides many answers and more. Kudos to DA's daughter Doon for releasing this material in a beautiful volume that has already provided hours of enlightenment, and it just arrived today. The printing is immaculate and the text is amazing with lots of passages from DA's journals, notebooks, school papers, letters and postcards. This book may well become the definitive work on her, as it provides much more insight to her life and work then the unauthorized biography from the 1980's by Bosworth. This is a perfect book, in my opinion.