Diane Arbus - A young Brooklyn family going for a Sunday outing, N.Y.C. (1966) By Liz Jobey

Diane Arbus - A Young Brooklyn Family Going For a Sunday Outing, N.Y.C. (1966) By Liz Jobey

A Young Brooklyn Family going for a Sunday Outing, N.Y.C. 1966, Diane Arbus

Liz Jobey starts her essay by talking about Diane Arbus’s photographs and how they raise a multitude of questions, in particularly she comments on this image of a young Brooklyn family and how fictions are always made on photographs.  She goes on to depict the image, giving her own in depth questions revolving around the family and a detailed description of the family in terms of their expression shown through the image which is summed up well by Diane Arbus herself “They were undeniably close in a painful sort of way”.

This quote delves deeper into the relationship of this couple and Jobey goes on further by finding out about the story of this family and each individual within it.  This quotation came from the letter Arbus wrote to Crookson, who was the magazine editor for the Sunday times.  He modified Arbus’s comments, which shifted the feeling of pain from the couple to the photographer, which Arbus wasn’t happy about.

The text carries on by describing Arbus’s rise in fame; her photographs were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, alongside two of her contemporaries, Lee Friedlander and Winogrand.  Jobey then talks about what made the photographs disturbing, the style in which she engaged with her subjects.  The appearance and attitude of people would draw her to them because she saw something that people wouldn’t necessarily see if she didn’t photograph them.

Her daughters were left to look after her estate and kept an eye on the release of her images after her suicide in 1971.  There was a chronological aspect to her work, as she took another shot of the Brooklyn family later on in her career.

Arbus was a liberal American, questioning “all-American” values and she was somebody who was for the freaks, people who were different from society, she hailed them because they held their own away from the mainstream and showed a true sense of American.

Reference:

Howarth, S. and Alexander, M.  D.  2005.
Singular images: Essays on Remarkable Photographs.
New York: Aperture
A Young Brooklyn Family Going For a Sunday Outing, N.Y.C. (1966) By Liz Jobey