Le Luma, in association with Les Rencontres d’Arles, presents Constellation, an installation of 454 photographs by Diane Arbus. An immersive and impressive exhibition to discover the photographer’s work.
Since Diane Arbus’ death in 1971, it has been her former assistant Neil Selkirk who has attempted to bring these pioneering works of photography to life, producing images that are in every way identical to the artist’s prints (same darkroom, same technique. ). He is the only one authorized to continue his work by Estate Arbus. For more than thirty years, he has amassed a large collection of photographs, which Luma acquired in 2011. Diane Arbus was a student of Berenice Abbott, Alexei Brodovich and Lisette Modell and was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1967 by John Szarkowski. Above all, she was one of the first female photographers to gain recognition in her lifetime.
A constellation of portraits that reveal the man
With the exhibition Constellation, in the photographs of Diane Arbus, some of which are unpublished, we discover the artist’s interest in the invisible. So it exposes the bodies of viewers or celebrities. We meet Jane Mansfield or James Brown, the two little twins who made him famous, but also a New York transvestite or a Puerto Rican housewife. The faces are often serious, the looks sincere. Bodies are naked, disabled, aged, black, fat, sculpted, invented, transformed to finally reveal their universality. Taken between the late 1950s and early 1970s, this footage revealed what American society at the time tried in vain to hide: rough edges in a very standardized, white and wholesome American dream. The photographer shows a part of humanity that is underrepresented in the quasi-documentary footage that catalogs the human species.
streetNYC 1966
Diane Arbus Collection Property Maja Hoffmann / LUMA Foundation
A city walk in the work of Diane Arbus
In this exhibition, all the paintings are scattered without a clear order and without reading the instructions of the large metal installations. More than one worry. The picture rails are gone and replaced with a geometric black metal frame that recreates an urban atmosphere. A common thread weaves through all of the New York artist’s works in the form of woven net-like buildings that invite you to walk between hollowed-out steel towers. As a tribute to this eternal wanderer who made the city-world his favorite habitat. The whole is surrounded by a wall of mirrors, thus offering vanishing points and openings. And sometimes even, the chance to see your own reflection in the middle of hundreds of Diane Arbus portraits.
“Diana Arbus. constellation’, at LUMA, La Tour, Main Gallery, Arles.
Source: Le Figaro
