Lot 124 D

Diane Arbus - Puerto Rican Woman with a Beauty Mark, NYC

Auction 1050 - overview Cologne
29.05.2015, 14:30 - Photography
Estimate: 10.000 € - 15.000 €

Diane Arbus

Puerto Rican Woman with a Beauty Mark, NYC
1965

Gelatin silver print on Agfa paper, printed 1969 by Neil Selkirk. 36.7 x 36.6 cm (50.3 x 40.4 cm). Estate stamp, therein signed, dated, titled and editioned in felt tip pen by Doon Arbus, on the verso. Print 42 from an edition of 75. - Small fold at right, small and expertly retouching upper left. Matted.

“Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come looking another way and that's what people observe. You see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw. It's just extraordinary that we should have been given these peculiarities. And, not content with what we were given, we create a whole other set. Our whole guise is like giving a sign to the world to think of us in a certain way but there's a point between what you want people to know about you and what you can't help people knowing about you. And that has to do with what I've always called the gap between intention and effect. I mean if you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really get to it, it becomes fantastic. You know it really is totally fantastic that we look like this and you sometimes see that very clearly in a photograph. Something is ironic in the world and it has to do with the fact that what you intend never comes out like you intend it.” (Quoted after: Diane Arbus, An Aperture Monograph, New York 1972, p. 2)

Literature

Doon Arbus/Elisabeth Sussman, Diane Arbus. Revelations. Offenbarungen, exhib.cat. Museum Folkwang, Essen, Munich 2003, ill. p. 84