A specific afternoon. The apartment of Eddie Carmel, age thirty-six, on Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, late October 1970. The apartment occupies the second floor of a five-story prewar building approximately three blocks from the Major Deegan Expressway. Eddie Carmel is seven feet seven inches tall, weighs approximately 480 pounds, suffers from acromegalic gigantism, and works occasionally as a sideshow attraction at carnivals under the stage name “the Jewish Giant.” His parents Isaac and Miriam Carmel, both approximately five feet two inches tall, live with him in the small two-bedroom apartment. The photographer Diane Arbus, age forty-seven, has been visiting the Carmel family for approximately ten years, since first meeting Eddie at a Coney Island freak show in 1960. She has photographed him perhaps a dozen times without producing the image she wants. On this particular afternoon she sets up a 2¼-inch square-format Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera on a tripod in the cramped living room, positions a single direct flash unit, and asks Eddie to stand looking down at his parents in the middle of the floor. The Carmel parents stand together, expressionless, looking up at their son. The shutter fires. The resulting photograph, “A Jewish Giant at Home with His Parents in The Bronx, N.Y.,” will be the last canonical image Arbus produces before her death nine months later. It will become one of the most recognized American photographs of the second half of the twentieth century.
Diane Nemerov of Park Avenue
The biographical origin. Diane Nemerov was born on March 14, 1923 in New York City, the second of three children of David and Gertrude Nemerov. The family was wealthy: David Nemerov ran Russek’s, a Fifth Avenue department store specializing in furs, which Gertrude’s father Frank Russek had founded in 1897. The Nemerov family lived in a substantial Park Avenue apartment, employed a household staff, and moved within the upper-middle-class Manhattan Jewish social world of the 1920s and 1930s.
Diane’s older brother Howard Nemerov, born 1920, became a poet and was named United States Poet Laureate twice (1963-1964 and 1988-1990). Her younger sister Renée Nemerov, born 1928, became a sculptor and designer.
Diane attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, a progressive private school on the Upper West Side, through her secondary education. She showed early talent in drawing and painting but no particular interest in photography. Her parents expected her to make a conventional upper-middle-class marriage.
In 1937, age fourteen, Diane met Allan Arbus, a nineteen-year-old advertising department employee at Russek’s. The two began a secret correspondence and met regularly without her parents’ knowledge through the next four years. Her parents disapproved of the relationship: Allan was from a less wealthy Jewish family in Brooklyn and worked in retail rather than the professions. Diane and Allan persisted. They married on April 10, 1941, three weeks after her eighteenth birthday and one week after Allan’s twenty-third.
The Fashion Photography Years
The commercial career. Allan Arbus had been interested in photography since adolescence and had developed his technical skills by photographing his own family. He served as a photographer in the United States Army Signal Corps during World War II, photographing official military operations across the Pacific and European theaters. He returned to New York in 1945 with substantial technical experience in studio and field photography.
The Arbuses opened a commercial fashion photography studio together in 1946 under the name “Diane & Allan Arbus.” The division of labor was conventional for the time: Allan operated the camera, Diane styled the shoots, art-directed the compositions, and managed the client relationships. Their first major client was Russek’s, where Diane’s father was happy to commission family photography work. Within two years they were working for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Glamour, Seventeen, and the New York Times Sunday magazine.
The studio was commercially successful through the late 1940s and the first half of the 1950s. Their two daughters were born during this period: Doon Arbus in April 1945 and Amy Arbus in April 1954. The family lived comfortably in Manhattan.
Diane increasingly took the photographs herself through the 1950s as Allan’s interest in commercial photography declined and his interest in acting grew. The credited byline “Diane & Allan Arbus” remained on the published work, but by 1955 most of the technical photography was Diane’s. The commercial fashion work bored both of them.
The Break and Lisette Model
The pivot to documentary. Diane Arbus stopped doing commercial fashion photography in 1956. She enrolled in a photography class taught by Berenice Abbott at the New School for Social Research in lower Manhattan, then transferred into a class taught by Lisette Model. Model, an Austrian-born documentary photographer who had moved to New York in 1938 and had been teaching at the New School since 1951, was the most important influence on Arbus’s mature work.
Model’s pedagogy emphasized direct confrontation with the subject, refusal of objective documentary distance, and the legitimacy of marginal social subjects as photographic content. Her own work, which included the canonical “Coney Island Bather” series (1939-1941) and the “Lower East Side” portraits (1942-1944), depicted overweight, elderly, eccentric, and marginal urban subjects with formal directness and no humanist softening. Arbus studied with Model through 1956 and 1957 and remained in close personal contact with her until Model’s death in 1983.
Diane and Allan Arbus separated in 1959, although they did not formally divorce until 1969. Allan moved to Los Angeles, where he gradually transitioned out of photography and into acting. He eventually achieved his most public recognition as Dr. Sidney Freedman on the television series MASH, which ran from 1972 to 1983.
Diane remained in New York. She supported herself through the 1960s with occasional magazine assignments (Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, Show, and others), Guggenheim Fellowship money, and teaching at Parsons School of Design and Cooper Union. She lived in a series of small apartments in lower Manhattan.
The Rolleiflex Vocabulary
The technical pivot. Arbus had been using a 35mm Nikon camera through the late 1950s. Around 1962 she switched to a Rolleiflex 2.8F, a German-made twin-lens reflex camera that produced a 2¼-inch square negative (approximately 6cm × 6cm) and was viewed through a waist-level finder rather than a pentaprism. The Rolleiflex required the photographer to look down into the camera while the subject faced forward, which produced a particular formal effect: the subject was photographed straight-on from approximately chest height, with direct eye contact and no eye-level intimacy.
Arbus added a direct flash unit mounted to the camera bracket, which produced flat, even illumination across the subject regardless of ambient light conditions, and which created the canonical “Arbus look”: flash-lit subjects against partially-dark backgrounds, with hard shadows, frontal composition, and uncomfortable directness. She worked exclusively in black and white. She used Tri-X film at ASA 400 and processed it herself.
The subjects she photographed between 1962 and 1971 included circus performers (sword swallowers, fire eaters, tattoo artists), nudists at family nudist camps in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, drag performers at small Manhattan clubs, professional and amateur transvestites, identical and fraternal twins, dwarfs and giants, mentally disabled adults at the Vineland Training School in New Jersey, suburban families in their living rooms, and elderly retirees at retirement communities in Florida.
Canonical images include “Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey” (1967), “Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C.” (Colin Wood, 1962), “Boy with a Straw Hat Waiting to March in a Pro-War Parade, N.Y.C.” (1967), and “A Jewish Giant at Home with His Parents in The Bronx, N.Y.” (1970).
Guggenheim and the New Documents
The institutional canonization. Arbus received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1963 (one of the most competitive American grants for working artists) and a second Guggenheim in 1966. The grants funded her work but did not provide a complete income; she continued taking magazine assignments through the period.
The institutional moment came in March 1967. John Szarkowski, who had been the Director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art since 1962, organized an exhibition called “New Documents” that opened on March 6, 1967 and ran through May 7. The exhibition paired Arbus with two other photographers: Garry Winogrand (born January 14, 1928, in the Bronx; primarily a street photographer using a 35mm Leica with a wide-angle lens) and Lee Friedlander (born July 14, 1934, in Aberdeen, Washington; primarily a photographer of the American social landscape using shop windows, signs, reflections, and self-portraits).
Szarkowski’s curatorial argument was that American photography had moved away from the optimistic humanism of the previous decade’s MoMA exhibition (Edward Steichen’s “The Family of Man” of 1955) and toward a subjective, skeptical, ironic documentary tradition. The three “New Documents” photographers were the canonical practitioners of this new tradition. The exhibition was widely reviewed in The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, and the art press, and established the trio as the dominant American photographers of the late 1960s.
The exhibition included thirty-two Arbus prints, including most of her canonical work from 1962-1967. The MoMA show was the institutional anchor that consolidated her reputation while she was alive.
The Death and the Canonization
Diane Arbus’s mental health had been precarious throughout her adult life. She experienced recurring depressive episodes from her early twenties onward. A hepatitis infection in 1966 left her chronically fatigued. The end of her marriage with Allan, her romantic relationship with the married art director Marvin Israel (who continued to live with his wife throughout the relationship), and the financial precarity of her independent career all contributed to the strain.
On July 26, 1971, Arbus took her own life in her apartment at 463 West Street in the West Village. Marvin Israel found her body two days later, on July 28. She was forty-eight years old.
The posthumous canonization was rapid. Szarkowski organized a major Arbus retrospective at MoMA that opened in November 1972; it traveled to seven American cities over the following two years and was the most-attended photography exhibition in MoMA history at the time. Aperture Foundation published a monograph titled Diane Arbus, edited by Doon Arbus (Diane’s elder daughter) and Marvin Israel, in December 1972; the book contained eighty Arbus photographs and an autobiographical text assembled from her writing. The Aperture monograph went through multiple printings and sold approximately 200,000 copies through the 1970s.
Susan Sontag’s 1973 essay “Freak Show” (later collected in her 1977 book On Photography) critiqued Arbus’s work on ethical grounds, arguing that the formal directness of the photographs disguised an underlying exploitation of marginal subjects. The Sontag critique opened a debate that has continued to the present.
Closing
The summary. The 1940s photography piece was about Robert Capa, the war front, and heroic photojournalism. The 1950s photography piece was about Dennis Stock, the Hollywood celebrity portrait, and the youth-market commercial image. The 1960s photography piece is about Diane Arbus, the Rolleiflex twin-lens camera, and the subjective documentary of marginal Americans.
The pivot is philosophical. Capa and the Magnum founders of the late 1940s photographed history happening in public places: soldiers in extremis, civilians in displacement, political events as documentary record. Stock and the celebrity portraitists of the 1950s photographed public figures as commercial products: celebrities, athletes, performers for magazine consumption. Arbus and the “New Documents” photographers of the 1960s photographed private psychological states in marginal social positions: twins, dwarfs, mental patients, nudists, suburban families as subjective investigations.
The technical signature is the Rolleiflex twin-lens square format with direct flash. Almost every contemporary documentary photographer who has used that technical vocabulary since 1962 has done so in conscious or unconscious reference to Arbus. The square format, the frontal pose, the direct flash, and the uncomfortable eye contact have remained the canonical American documentary photographic vocabulary for sixty-four years.
Arbus’s work has been continuously exhibited, reprinted, and debated. The Sontag critique has been answered, restated, and re-answered through dozens of subsequent essays. The Aperture monograph has been in continuous print since 1972 and has sold an estimated one million copies through 2026. Eddie Carmel died in August 1972, fourteen months after the canonical photograph. He never saw his portrait in print.