PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Through an assemblage of articles, criticism, and essays from 1967 to the present, this groundbreaking publication charts the reception of the photographer’s work and offers comprehensive insight into the critical conversations, as well as misconceptions, around this highly influential artist.
Best known for her penetrating images exploring what it means to be human, Diane Arbus is a pivotal and singular figure in American postwar photography. Arbus’s black-and-white photographs demolish aesthetic conventions and upend all certainties. Both lauded and criticized for her photographs of people deemed “outsiders,” Arbus continues to be a lightning rod for a wide range of opinions surrounding her subject matter and approach. Critics and writers have described her work as “sinister” and “appalling” as well as “revelatory,” “sincere,” and “compassionate.”
Illuminating fifty years of evolution in the field of art criticism, Documents provides a new template for understanding the work of any formidable artist. Organized in eleven sections that focus on major exhibitions and significant events emerging from Arbus’s work, as well as on her methods and intentions, the sixty-nine facsimiles of previously published articles and essays––an archive by all accounts––trace the discourse on Arbus, contextualizing her inimitable oeuvre. Supplemented by an annotated bibliography of more than six hundred entries and a comprehensive exhibition history, Documents serves as an important resource for photographers, researchers, art historians, and art critics, in addition to students of art criticism and the interested reader alike.
BOOK INFORMATION
Trim Size: 8.5 × 11 in
Number of Pages: 496
Binding Method:
Paper: Soporset
Typefaces:
CREDIT INFORMATION
Creative Director:
Art Director:
Book Designer: Yolanda Cuomo and Bonnie Briant
Jacket/Cover Designer:
Illustrator:
Photographer: Kerry McFate
Picture Editor:
Production Director: Jules Thomson
Production Coordinator: Luke Chase
Production Artist:
Other Credits:
Diane Arbus Documents
Category
Book and Cover
Description
Winner - AIGA 50 Books | 50 Covers of 2022
Book Title: Diane Arbus Documents
Design Firm/Agency:
Publisher: David Zwirner Books and Fraenkel Gallery
Author/Editor: Max Rosenberg, Beth Gordon, Lucas Zwirner, Jeffrey Fraenkel
Juror Comments
“This book’s singular cover, shot by a camera facing a woman (Diane Arbus) facing a set of pictures, nicely sets up the complexity of gaze and position alive in this book. The result is that to me this book feels both ordinary and extraordinary. Small details reveal the care and precision of the design choices. I especially appreciate the advertising, page numbers and edges that are left uncropped. These (un)cropping choices allow the viewer points of meaningful entry to the document’s historic and social context. Dizzyingly arranged and layered, but maintaining a core of readability, these ‘documents’ become both a landscape and a relic—one to be read, viewed and re-examined.”
Winner Status
- 50 Books Winner
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