Diane Arbus was an American photographer and writer noted for photographs of marginalised people dwarfs, giants, transgender people, nudists, circus performers and others whose normality was perceived by the general populace as ugly or surreal. 

 

She was Born on the 14th of March 1923, New York City, New York, United States and committed suicide at the age of 48 on the 26th of July 1971, Greenwich Village, New York City, New York, United States.

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Arbus was born Diane Nemerov to David Nemerov and Gertrude Russek Nemerov, a Jewish couple who lived in New York City and owned Russek's, a famous Fifth Avenuedepartment store. Because of her family's wealth, Arbus was insulated from the effects of the Great Depression while growing up in the 1930s. Her father became a painter after retiring from Russek's, her younger sister would become a sculptor and designer, and her older brother, Howard Nemerov, a professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, would later become United States Poet Laureate and the father of the Americanist art historian Alexander Nemerov. Diane Nemerov attended the Fieldston School for Ethical Culture, a prep school. 

 

In 1941, at the age of eighteen, she married her childhood sweetheart Allan Arbus. Their first daughter, Doon, who would later become a writer, was born in 1945, their second daughter, Amy, who would later become a photographer, was born in 1954. Allan had given Diane her first camera after their honeymoon and she began developing an independent relationship to photography.

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The Arbuses' interests in photography led them, in 1941, to visit the gallery of Alfred Stieglitz, and learn about photographers. In the early 1940s, Diane's father employed them to take photographs for the department store's advertisements. Allan was a photographer for the U.S. Army Signal Corps in World War Two. In 1946, after the war, the Arbuses began a commercial photography business called "Diane & Allan Arbus", with Diane as art director and Allan as the photographer. Diane would come up with the concepts for their shoots and then take care of the models. She grew dissatisfied with this role, a role even her husband thought was "demeaning." They contributed to Glamour, Seventeen, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and other magazines even though "they both hated the fashion world." Despite over 200 pages of their fashion editorial in Glamour, and over 80 pages in Vogue, the Arbuses' fashion photography has been described as of "middling quality". Edward Steichen's noted 1955 photography exhibition, The Family of Man, did include a photograph by the Arbuses of a father and son reading a newspaper.